Section:GDN 1J PaGe:2 Edition Date:190821 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 20/8/2019 18:30 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Wednesday 21 Aug ust 2019
2
autumn, just as in 2010, the media and civil-
society institutions will play a crucial role
as arbiters of what is politically permissible.
In other words, the treatment dished out to the previous
Labour leader was but a dry run for that likely to be
doled out to Jeremy Corbyn in the next few weeks.
For his half-decade in charge, Miliband was treated
in a way that should embarrass, if not shame, some
in politics, the press and business. Disappointed that
Labour had chosen “the wrong brother”, some of his
own shadow cabinet immediately began whispering
poison into the ears of journalists. Having never given
him much of a chance, they then threatened a coup.
The Tories would greet almost any of his policies by
calling him a communist. A cap on energy bills? That,
retorted George Osborne, was basically Venezuela.
Until, that is, he saw how well the idea was polling.
“ I would sit with business leaders who would tell me
that a 50p tax on higher incomes was a radical economic
risk, that an energy price cap was radical socialism,”
recalls Torsten Bell, then head of policy to Miliband and
now head of the well-respected economics thinktank the
Resolution Foundation. “ And I would say: no, it really
isn’t. You need to look up the meaning of economic risk.”
When the political class reali sed the country largely
sympathi sed with Miliband’s ideas they began attacking
his physiology. “He doesn’t look like a prime minister,”
his own backbenchers would murmur to journalists.
Never mind that he’d already amassed more cabinet
experience than Blair and Cameron put together when
they started in N o 10.
The same tabloids that today are rightly attentive to
Labour’s issues with antisemitism spent years splashing
on photos of a Jewish man struggling to swallow a bacon
sandwich – the subtext of which was never hard to read.
The Mail famously conducted hatchet jobs on his dead
dad, who’d fl ed the Holocaust. No opportunity was
passed up to heap ordure on the man, however unfair.
My colleague Rafael Behr records how a political editor
went up to the Labour leader and congratulated him on
a great speech, before leaning in: “I’m sorry about all the
terrible things we are now going to write about you.”N
one of this is to excuse the
mistakes of the Miliband project:
the immigration mugs and the
gigantic slabs of limestone and
in particular the failure to argue
against austerity. But the bottom
line is this: M iliband came not to
bury capitalism, but to save it.
He off ered Britain a smidgen of basic social democracy,
the smallest taste of redistribution. By dismissing
that argument, the establishment in eff ect sent out
one unifi ed message to voters mired in a slump: that
post-crash Britain was unreformed and unreformable.
That argument was to be used against the elites with
deadly eff ect in the EU referendum of 2016.
The similarities between Corbyn and Miliband are
close, as people in both camps agree. One Labour
frontbencher told me recently, “Our 2017 manifesto
was basically the programme Miliband would have
loved to have presented” – and when I ran that by a
senior advis er to the previous Labour leader, they
agreed. For all the hard-left epithets fl ung at today’s
opposition, it off ers the kind of European social
democracy that Angela Merkel would recogni se.
I hear about Corbyn the same kind of criticism I heard
about Miliband : he’s a weak leader, he’s too radical,
he’s too n orth London. The diff erence this time around
is that the stakes are even higher. Britain is heading
fast down the road to economic disaster and far-right
extremist politics. One wonders about those who wail
at the prospect of a n o-deal Brexit and Johnson staying
in No 10 yet who also screw up their face at the notion
of any compromise with Corbyn’s Labour. Some I
remember also treated Miliband with disdain, while a
few spent the Blair years urging left wingers not to let
the ideologically perfect be the enemy of the good.
All I’d say is: don’t make the same mistake
again. Don’t look at a Labour leader who inevitably
comes with his own let downs and fl aws, and choose
plummy-vowelled, confi dent-voiced chaos instead.If there is any fragile encouragement to be squeezed
out of Boris Johnson’s letter to the European Union this
week, it is perhaps the fact that he wrote it at all. After
four weeks of acting as if the EU does not exist, the
existence of the letter is at least an implied recognition
that the relationship with the EU matters. For nearly a
month, Mr Johnson’s government has also promoted the
fi ction that a no-deal Brexit is an acceptable prospect for
Britain. So when Mr Johnson starts his letter by saying
that he very much hopes the UK will be leaving with a
deal, it is just about possible to muster some carefully
guarded optimism that he may actually mean it.
Yet the content of what he wrote makes a mockery
of any such conclusion. In fact it is diffi cult to see how
Mr Johnson could have done less than he does in the
letter to Donald Tusk. At the core of the letter is the
statement that the Irish backstop is not viable. The letter
then excoriates the backstop as undemocratic, a brake
on UK trade and regulatory policy and a threat to the
Northern Ireland peace process. In most respects, this is
the opposite of the truth. In some ways it is downright
mischievous. The letter is more like one of Mr Johnson’s
fact-free and irresponsible newspaper concoctions than
a serious diplomatic approach to solving an impasse that
imminently threatens British economic stability , trade,
jobs, constitutional cohesion and security.
It is important to remember what the backstop is. It
is a customs and regulatory arrangement of last resort
to address the unique situation in Ireland, for which
Britain has shared legal and moral responsibility. It
is designed to maintain an open and seamless border
in Ireland in perpetuity. It would only apply if the UK
and the EU cannot agree, by the end of the transition
period, to a deal maintaining such a border. That is
made more diffi cult by the tension between the UK
government’s insistence on leaving the customs unionFive years ago a young woman broke up with her
boyfriend, who was so off ended by this that he posted
nearly 10,000 words of misery and self-justifi cation to the
internet – and set in motion a movement which became
known as “ Gamergate”. Not only the woman but others
who came to her defence were threatened with rape and
murder by strangers. Companies who advertised on sites
which took her side were pressured to withdraw their
advertisements, and some, such as Intel, did so.
The reasons off ered for this vileness were
multifarious and incoherent , but included the false
claim that Zoë Quinn, the original target, had slept with
a journalist to ensure a favourable review of a computer
game she had written. But the emotions behind it
formed a coherent bundle. This was the contagious
rage of men who felt themselves despised and
dispossessed except when they sat at a keyboard.
Elements of this toxic brew had been around since
the dawn of mass communication. The use of private
and personal details to fl ay someone in public for the
pleasure of strangers was pioneered by the tabloid press.
But Gamergate revealed that the power of bullying has
been redistributed online, so that the harassment
once generally reserved for victims who might beand the single market, and the UK’s obligations
under the Good Friday agreement which ensures
the “demilitarisation” of the border as part of the
peace process. Theresa May’s hope that ways could
be found, amid mutual trust, of reconciling these
objectives over time led Britain to propose such a
backstop, to which the EU agreed. It should have been
supported. But it split the Conservative party and
triggered the overthrow of Mrs May by Mr Johnson.
The argument therefore directly pits the wish
of the ruling hard-Brexit wing of the Tory party to
deregulate the UK economy against Britain’s historic
responsibilities to maintain peace in Northern Ireland
and good relations with its neighbours in the Irish
Republic. Polls, including one this week , show that
what Mr Johnson proposes is rejected by the people
of Northern Ireland (who also voted to remain in the
EU back in 2016). They would prefer a regulatory
border between Northern Ireland and Britain rather
than between the two parts of Ireland. The US
Congress has also said it will block any UK-US trade
deal that undermines the peace process. Mr Johnson’s
letter, with its brusque demand that the backstop
must be scrapped, is both a dangerously frivolous
threat to Ireland north and south and a gamble with
his already highly tendentious trade aspirations.
It is easy to conclude that the letter is not a credible
attempt to negotiate an alternative to the backstop at
all. It contains two shoddily unreliable suggestions.
One is to create “alternative arrangements” by the
end of the transition period “as far as possible”.
The other is to look “constructively and fl exibly”
at other commitments. In neither case is there any
detail. If this is an opening bid in a process that is
seriously intended to result in a deal with the EU,
it is an extraordinarily reckless way of going about
something on which so much rests.
Unsurprisingly, Mr Tusk has rejected all this
because Mr Johnson off ers no alternatives. Any
possibility of progress towards a deal now rests on
meetings this week at the G7 summit in Biarritz.
Angela Merkel seemed to imply yesterday that she,
at least, is in the business of being serious about
trying to reconcile Brexit with the Irish peace
process. The question facing her and all of us is
whether Mr Johnson is capable of being serious too.described as famous could now be turned on anyone
at all. The new movement was leaderless and self-
organising, like a mob. No one could call off the
furies it unleashed while the animating spirits could
shelter behind the pseudonymity off ered by forums
including 4chan and 8chan. This anger spread like
fi re: those wounded by it fl ared back.
The second horror to emerge was a particular
style of entitled and embittered masculinity.
Attacks on women were the start of the movement
and remained its prime concern: “Feminists have
ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my
sake and for the sake of all the others they have
wronged,” wrote one young man , threatening a
mass shooting at a university if a talk by a woman
on Gamergate was not cancelled.
These poisons have now leached into the main
body of politics. Misogyny is now as well established
in the culture of the far right as it is among the
jihadists they hate. So are fantasies of cleansing
violence. The exploitation of Twitter and YouTube
as the media of choice for propaganda can also now
be taken for granted. Until and unless the advertising
companies who own them take this style of threat to
society seriously, signifi cant change is unlikely.
The original fury of Gamergate was sparked by the
emergence of games as a cultural form which could be
used to convey much more than the simple pleasures
of blasting imaginary enemies – and was beginning
to attract newly diverse audiences. This process
continues. No one subculture – not even teenage
white boys – now owns games. This opening up was,
and remains, a source of fury. But perhaps, fi ve years
on, it should also be viewed as a reason to hope. Continued from frontGamergate was vicious.
But it taught us a lesson
about online toxicity
Digital politics
Brexit
Boris Johnson’s letter to
the EU is a frivolous gamble
with two nations’ futures
Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust No 53 ,805
‘Comment is free... but facts are sacred’ CP Scott
Can’t abide Corbyn? Learn
from the moral of Miliband
Aditya Chakrabortty
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