It’s not Left vs Right anymore. It’s humanity vs inhumanity.

We need to challenge the right-wing tactic of re-defining moral truths as ‘Leftie ranting’

If you want to know what a Nigel Farage premiership might look like, watch Russell Davies’ ‘Years and Years’. In attempting to avert this Trumpesque future, silence will be our undoing.

Mainstream media and political leaders suffer from ‘geopolitical drag’ that inhibits the expression of honesty on the reality of events. Gaza is a killing field and yet the UK government’s long-standing geopolitical entanglements with Israel mean they can’t articulate this for what it is, any more than they can take an honest stand against Donald Trump.

It was the same with Boris Johnson. We could all see the appalling chaos he created, the negligence leading to so many unnecessary Covid deaths, the self-serving lies and corruption, the extreme administrative incompetence. We could all see a man, led by deeply misplaced self-belief, playing at leadership. It was there in technicolour, every day.

Yet politicians and the press mostly tiptoed round Johnson’s massive failings. Only after he left could they concede that he’d been a disaster. In the meantime, we all staggered on with the ghastly status quo, just as we are doing now with Benjamin Netanyahu, Farage and the abominable Trump.

Inevitable noise

The leadership and press ‘delicacy’ we are sold is fundamentally a moral failing. That Netanhayu’s Gaza attacks violate the Geneva Convention is beyond debate now. Nor is there any possible world in which Trump, a felon hellbent on upending the global economy, violating human rights and shutting down US health, education and science, is a good leader. These conclusions no more have two sides than does the ‘flat earth’ debate.

And yet our leaders and press chunter dishonestly on. Occasionally something breaks through the slumber. Series like Adolescence and Mr Bates vs the Post Office managed to cut through, like wakeful murmurings in an otherwise deep sleep. But for the rest, the media ensures that our moral outrage is woven into the backdrop of daily political life as inevitable ‘Left of field’ noise.

The real battle

We use ‘Left-wing’ and Right-wing’ as identifying markers on the political spectrum. But ‘Left vs Right’ isn’t the key battle now. Nor is the battle usefully conceived as between Democrats and Republicans or, more broadly, ‘authoritarianism vs liberal democracy’ or ‘neo-liberal oligarchies vs democratic socialism’.

The real battle is essentially between humanity and inhumanity. It is our humanity that is under assault.

And let’s call the battle precisely this because our humanity underpins everything else. Democracy, economics, and sovereignty are not ends in themselves. Their purpose is to uphold human rights by creating systems of governance, trade and national autonomy that help protect us from harm, preserve our liberty, and flourish as a species. “Liberal democracy is built on the concept that every human being has inherent dignity and universal rights” (Hope Not Hate).

These rights have an inbuilt societal dimension which follows from the universal logical principle that we should treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves, with fairness, dignity and compassion. This societal dimension enshrines our responsibility to protect the rights of others and extends to our communities and beyond, meaning we must at least care and strive to act. Geopolitics may obstruct our responses to famines and wars in other countries but must not de-sensitise us. Our responsibilities also include respect for diversity (ethnic, gender, religious, cultural, creative), and for society’s survival: climate activism is about preserving our planet for the future of others.

In the ring

As regards this mother of all battles, in one corner of the ring is humanity.

In the other corner is inhumanity, represented by the far-right mindsets of Vladimir Putin, Trump, Viktor Orban and their global network. These dictators are ‘inhumanitarians’ in having no conception of human rights and, as autocracy scholar Ruth Beh-Ghiat notes, “no morals or values beyond power”. They lack empathy, profoundly fear difference, are compelled by vindictiveness, and feel driven to control and dominate.

Trump has no moral qualms about cuts to Harvard medical research funding or the thousands devastated by USAID cuts. His challenges to the sovereignty of Ukraine, Canada, Gaza and Greenland are inhumanitarian because they threaten the self-determination of these regions and the individuals within them. MAGA is an inhumanitarian mindset because it is indifferent to humanity beyond a nativist subset of citizens within its own shores.

Inhumanity isn’t confined to ‘the Right’. Labour’s disability benefit cuts constitute “performative cruelty”, as does it’s shameful aping of Reform by parading images of guards loading deportees onto planes. The moral outrage these actions triggered was germane to voters defecting to other parties in the recent local elections.

The ‘bucket’ tactic

The most profound scam in this political culture is its weaponisation of the label ‘Left’. Right-leaning politicians (including Blue Labour) and their press use this label as a political bucket in which to dump opponents. Humanitarian concern is lampooned as militant Left extremism, with “woke” serving as the Right’s attack term for displaying often visceral levels of contempt.

Hence, respect for gender diversity as a human right is re-formulated as ‘the woke left corrupting school children and flouting biological science’. Outrage at the genocidal killings in Gaza becomes ‘antisemitism’, or ‘the rantings of “radical left lunatics”. Calls for increased benefits for vulnerable people becomes ‘the Left welcoming exploitative scroungers’. Concern for the plight of migrants becomes a ‘dangerous Leftie plan to open the Uk’s floodgates’.

But these aren’t ‘left-wing’ concerns. They are humanitarian ones. Re-branding them as ‘left’ is a ruse, a silencing strategy that reduces our basic humanity to mere ideological opinion which can then be ignored or rejected a priori.

I hear you but …

The bucket tactic also eases guilt. Inhumanitarians can say ‘I hear your fury about the dead refugee boy washed up on the beach, at US deportations of innocent people, at the rioters’ attacks on UK Muslims. Somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious I hear the rightness of this rage. But if I can silence your voice by putting your concerns in the bucket of ‘Leftie ranting’ then I have an alternative explanation that prays less heavily on my conscience. And the more revulsion I can muster for the ‘woke-Left’ narrative, the harder my own conscience is to reach.’ It’s an ongoing, self-reinforcing process.

Simplistic Naïvety ?

The status quo defender will protest that these ‘Left concerns’ deserve lampooning because they fail to grasp the geopolitical complexity of the issues.

Views like ‘no migrant should be turned away’ are simplistic. The meaningful ‘Left’ demand though is that humanitarian concerns should become central to government policymaking and media messaging.

Willingness, within reason, to pay is a marker of a society’s humanity. Saying ‘we’re cutting Personal Independence Payments and funding arms and military intelligence for Israel’ simply doesn’t wash.

Nor is it acceptable, whilst grappling with migration, to slide into racist demonisation that undermines the rights of migrants to respect and compassion.

It must also be acknowledged that some anxieties about migration deserve a hearing, and that some forms of migration do put some pressure on some resources. A nuanced understanding of both sides of the debate is essential but with ethical solutions as the bottom line.

Here the ‘simplistic naivety’ charge is turned on its head since calling for ethical funding, respect for diverse rights, and for policies that work but avoid ‘othering’, recognises the complexity of meaningful solutions to the big issues (the Israel / Gaza conflict, migration, trans rights, benefits, fair taxation). It is inhumanitarian approaches, like harsh treatment to deter migrants, and forcing vulnerable groups into employment, that are lazily simplistic.

The power of exposure

But can perceptions be shifted if humanitarian arguments are invariably ring-fenced as ‘from the suspect Left’?

When Channel 4 had the bright idea of posting a small group of vehement British anti-migrants to Syria and Somalia, the participants altered their views through exposure. They changed, not by moving from right-wing to left-wing, but by meeting and communicating with people needing to migrate, by experiencing for themselves the dangers of crossing a mountain pass, and of negotiating the Channel in an overloaded dingy in pitch darkness. They changed because they were placed in circumstances that enabled them to rediscover their humanity. This has nothing (and yet everything) to do with politics.

Not so much Left as right

But beyond the odd televisual breakthrough, humanitarians are still shouting to be heard from the recesses of their bucket, surrounded by mufflers. Their responses to the raw horror of human rights abuses are silenced by the very act, used by politicians and the media, of politicisation, of rebranding justified moral outrage as ‘the Left viewpoint’.

Since “silence is complicity” then we should be vocally angry with our news media for its cowardly conceit of ducking the glaring truth, for wooing us into complacency in the face of political evil, and for using paralysing both-sidesism to divert us from the inhumanitarian abuses being conducted by malevolent leaders.

Trumpism should be galvanising us, stirring our humanity and highlighting its precious significance. We should, therefore, be loudly resisting the UK’s somnambulant Farage-led drift into Trumpesque authoritarianism we witnessed in the latest elections.

To fight a Trumpesque future we should abandon the useless straight jacket of ‘Left vs Right’ and replace it with the more powerful, crystal-clear moral axis of right vs wrong. This viewpoint recognises the complexity of today’s big issues but helps fundamentally to change our approach, our priorities, and to expose the political strategies holding our tribal blindfolds in place.

Claire Jones writes and edits for West England Bylines and is co-ordinator for the Oxfordshire branch of the progressive campaign group, Compass