Caerphilly and the British political landscape

I don't think that I'm a natural democrat. I am by nature an aristocrat, distrustful of mass politics, preferring smaller communities, traditional ways of doing things. I am inclined to agree with Russell (himself a figure on the libertarian Left) when he wrote: “What can a charwoman know of the spirits of great men or the records of falling empires or the haunting visions of art and reason? Let us not delude ourselves with the hope that the best is within reach of all.” Russell went on to identify the values of the group to which he felt he belonged as “fearlessness, independence of judgement, emancipation from the herd, and leisurely culture.” Should such an aristocratic temperament make me more sympathetic to the Right of politics? But the Right is not in the least bit aristocratic, and hasn't been for a long time. Thatcher was a grocer's daughter, with the mentality to match. The Right is hostile to rules that protect individual liberties (hence the current pledge on the part of both the Conservatives and Reform to rip up the European Convention on Human Rights); it vaunts individual economic success at the expense of community, offering up the nation as the only legitimate community. In short, the Right offer not aristocratism, but only populist authoritarianism, capitalist oligarchy, and nationalism; and it seems to me that anyone with a genuinely aristocratic temper of mind must support the Left in order to counter the disaster of a Faragist takeover. It was so much easier in the nineteenth century when everyone seemed to believe that humanity was progressing towards perfection. Can any serious thinker, outside of Marxists who haven't noticed that the world has changed somewhat since 1848, still believe this fairy tale? Society is becoming more brutal, less civilised, and has been moving in this direction over the course of my life. Never before have we had a genocide streamed to our phones with our rulers (and many of our fellow citizens) indifferent. So, disdaining the illusions of progressivism, the far future is not our business. Maybe humanity will be superseded in ways that we cannot predict or even imagine. What matters in politics is what is at hand, the practical steps we can take to improve the lives of those living in the here and now, and those who will be born this century. In Britain there is now talk on the part of mainstream politicians of mass deportations of migrants and their families who are here perfectly legally, in order to restore “cultural coherence”. (Look up the remarks of rising Tory star Katie Lam; her remarks were supported by party leader Kemi Badenoch, and are in line with current Tory policies.) If society goes down this path, then it will be poorer, with less of a safety net for the losers in the economic struggle. I cannot speak for other countries, but in Britain the next few years are absolutely crucial. The old managerial middle ground has collapsed, and our society stands before a distinct fork in the road. The path of the Right spells riches for the few and poverty for the majority. It is against the interests of the vast majority of those who vote for Farage, and this must be brought home to them with a radical politics based around community and challenging the domination of the market, a politics that it seems the legacy parties are no longer capable of providing. The Caerphilly by-election in Wales a few days ago has shown two things. Whenever Labour (or the Tories, though they hardly count these days) pit a politics of managerialism and PR against a politics of discontent, rage and imported culture wars, then it is the Right that wins. But the Caerphilly result also shows us something else, that whenever a politics of rage is countered by a politics of inclusive community rooted in a sense of place (as in Plaid Cymru) then the latter is capable of winning, and by a substantial margin. In Ireland too, the recent election of Catherine Connolly as President shows that a radical politics of community can still win out over a politics of scaremongering and scapegoating that the centre ground are incapable of defeating. In Caerphilly, community politics was represented by Plaid Cymru, in England it will be represented by the Greens, the Corbyn-Sultana Party or the Liberal Democrats, depending on the constituency. It might even be represented by Labour, but only if Starmer and his Blairite friends are got rid of for good and all. A third of people in countries across Europe may be voting for the far right, but where there are candidates representing something other than capitalist managerialism, voters can still coordinate to defeat the fascist politics of despair. Civilisation is not yet wholly lost. -- Russell quotes from Ronald Clark's Bertrand Russell and his world (Thames and Hudson, 1960)