The Rise of the Alt-Left
The Changing Goalposts of "Team Hate"
I don’t usually enjoy a convivial lunch at the House of Lords only to snub the host months later, but that is precisely what I did. You see, I recently accepted an invitation to speak at a conference on policing during which I would comment on the political capture of the British police. I have done this many times on many platforms resulting in, usually, only the police becoming vexed. I expected this occasion to be no different. After all, amongst those gathered around the lunch table back in March were delegates from the libertarian think tank, Civitas, to whom I was introduced. Then recently, three days before the policing conference was due to take place, my WhatsApp lit up like a radicalised Christmas tree with pleas, denunciations and demands leaving me in no doubt that my speaking at the conference would render me untouchable.
The problem had nothing to do with my proposed message; as far as I am aware, these self-appointed priests of virtue are in broad agreement with our legal challenges against the College of Policing as they stand to benefit as much as anyone from our success. The problem was the platform and the line-up of other potential speakers, including Luton’s answer to Hitler: Tommy Robinson. A man so reviled that his name is often reduced to initials.
Given Robinson’s history with the vile English Defence League, it is understandable that some would sound a cautionary alarm...except for one thing: If Tommy Robinson represents a nadir of unacceptability on the right, who are the equivalent untouchables on the left?
I doubt that being booked to speak on a platform hosted by The Guardian in a line-up containing woke multi-millionaire Gary Lineker or former CEO of Stonewall, Ruth Hunt, would provoke a single howl of disapproval. I would bet my house and everything in it that there would be cheers of encouragement and hints to do some organisational name dropping in place of the recent rush for the door.
No matter that the left-wing journalist, Suzanne Moore, had just exposed The Guardian to be a misogynist’s paradise or that in order to speak out for women’s rights, she had been forced to flee to the sanctuary of the right-wing Mail On Sunday. Or that her #BeKind colleagues had demanded nothing less than hatred for the Conservative family that she loved. Despite this, it is a platform featuring Tommy Robinson that endures as the untouchable embodiment of hate.
That speaking to a right-wing audience on a right-wing platform with alt-right speakers is seen as an unconscionable betrayal, yet speaking to a left-wing audience on a left-wing platform with alt-left speakers is seen as an opportunity reveals the deep-seated assumptions about these relative audiences. The far left is regarded as intelligent, informed, committed to Build Back Better, capable of learning, and worthy of our time, whereas the far right is dismissed as irredeemable. This is a convenient myth which persists like a magical dose of herpes, endowing Guardian readers with a capacity to separate untold column inches of misogyny and Anti-Semitism from an otherwise worthy mission. If audiences were a car, the left would be a green electric Prius, the right, a toxic diesel van.
Intellectual Apartheid is nothing new. Before the Reformation, priests delivered their sermons in Latin because the laity were viewed as too fundamentally sinful to be given unfiltered access to holy ideas. When William Tyndale opposed Henry VIII's proposed annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in 1530, he was strangled to death and burned at the stake for this. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the hated—and inconveniently-executed—bourgeoisie were replaced by the lumpenproletariat (literally, the contemptible people) as the group upon whom it was considered a virtue to pour scorn. In 2015, Hilary Clinton succumbed to a similar loathing, contrasting the virtue of her Democrats with the “Basket of Deplorables” supporting Trump.
Progressive parties require a bogeyman and the British left is no different. The left loves Tommy Robinson more than the right loves Tommy Robinson, as he provides the low-brow excuse for some high-brow shunning. In fact, any member of the working class who fails to demonstrate the political sophistication of Robert Tressell’s hero in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, can expect to be ridiculed, dismissed, ignored and numbered amongst the cockroaches. Given access to power, the high priests of our national virtue would doubtless remove suffrage from the Tommy types as it seems unlikely that they could be trusted at the ballot box when they are deemed unworthy to be addressed at a Zoom conference.
But what of the “deplorables” on the alt-left? Well, according to Google, the alt-left does not exist. Search “left-wing hate group” and only right-wing groups pop up. The consequence of such an algorithm is that the alt-Left is able to hide in plain sight, thereby avoiding the social awkwardness which comes with being labelled a Nazi. This is all very convenient as it means Owen Jones can campaign against women’s rights and still be invited onto Jeremy Vine’s show and Ash Sarkar can tweet that she is on “Team Hate” and be given a warm welcome on Question Time. Had a member of the alt-right uttered “I’m on Team Hate," they would be advised to check their door knobs for novichok. But that, of course, is the deceptive beauty of the alt-left. To borrow from Kaiser Soze, “The greatest trick the alt-Left ever pulled was to make us believe it doesn’t exist.”
Failure to acknowledge its own hate is directly traceable to the denial of its own history. Last month, a lecturer from Oxbridge congratulated his student on the choice of flag adorning his room, despite the emblem being associated with the murder of around 20 million. Had the backdrop been a swastika rather than a hammer and sickle, it is fair to imagine a response that did not include an admiring virtual back slap. Left-wing atrocities are either ignored or sanitised by reference to wider context, leading to the absurd spectacle of Diane Abbott stating on national TV in 2008 that it was permissible for a person to wear a Chairman Mao T-shirt because, “On balance, some would say that he did more good than harm." Mao Zedong tops the list of genocidal maniacs, with a murder count of 45 million. A similar comment about Hitler or Mussolini would have been career-ending, whereas Abbot was promoted to Shadow Home Secretary.
Where the left does acknowledge atrocity, such as the million murdered in the killing fields of Cambodia by the alt-left ideologues of the Khmer Rouge, or the half a million murdered during the Ethiopian Red Terror, or the cultural genocide of Tibet, these are dismissed as having occurred far, far away. Hitler, it is pointed out, was on our doorstep. Aside from the casual racism of this approach (we expect that kind of thing from foreigners), it is a geographical straw man. Berlin, home to the Stasi, is as close to London as John O’Groats.
An inevitable consequence of this piece will be a chorus of alt-leftists denying the moniker and howling with rage that I have written what they will consider to be an alt-right, Tommy Robinson appreciation piece. The sad fact is, such a chorus will entirely prove my point.