Paper Tories

In 1956, Mao Zedong described US imperialism as a paper tiger – seemingly powerful but weak in substance, depending on threats and posturing to maintain its hegemony. Observing the Tory leadership election, you can begin to see what he meant.

Rishi Sunak has attempted to make a pitch for himself as the ‘anti-China’ candidate, naming China and its ruling Communist Party ‘the greatest threat to Britain’ and promising to ‘lead the world’ in standing up to ‘Chinese aggression’. Liz Truss’ campaign has responded by highlighting her record in office as Treasurer of applying economic pressure to China. Whoever ends up Prime Minister, this squabble indicates that the British state is clearly moving towards an escalation of neo-Cold War policies on China. Of course, the original Cold War was anything but cold – and indeed, Sunak appears to be taking cues from Johnson’s ability to successfully position himself at the centre of global warmongering in Ukraine. Both Sunak and Truss are signalling their willingness to play their part in a Western proxy war with China, no matter how many lives this will cost.

This is not the first time the Tory leadership contest has descended into squabbles over who can take the most reactionary stance. Before being beaten in earlier rounds, Kemi Badenoch had repeatedly attempted to portray her rivals as soft on trans issues, compared to her own apparent hardline defence of women’s ‘sex based’ rights. Every other candidate jumped at the bait, assuring voters and supporters of their commitment to far right gender discourse that has been so rapidly normalised by the British press. Truss has once again been able to stand by her record as Equalities Minister, in which she refused to include trans people in a ban on conversion therapy, whereas Sunak is expected to announce a ‘manifesto for women’s rights’ including a policy to prohibit trans women from accessing ‘women’s sports’. With Badenoch out of the race, these policies appear to have taken a back seat, but it is clear that both Truss and Sunak can be expected to continue with the current trajectory of the British state in making public space increasingly hostile and dangerous for trans and gender nonconforming people.

At the same time, however, from a long-term perspective, it is hard to read these policies and feel they are anything other than underwhelming. All that every candidate has to offer is more of the same – escalating international warmongering, escalating attacks on trans people, escalating attacks on migrant workers, and escalating austerity. The debate on China, especially, reveals the fundamental weakness of the Tory leadership. Even at their most aggressive and assertive, in Sunak’s insistence on ‘leading the world’ against China, the proposed measures are little more than surveillance and economic protectionism. As dangerous as the new cold war on China is, that Sunak cannot even commit himself to proposing new sanctions on China or territorial defence is telling as to the scale of the British state’s role in our present conjuncture. Even more tellingly is his promise that, ‘I will work with president Biden and other world leaders to transform the West’s resilience to the threat China poses’. Much like that great idol of the contemporary Tory Party, Margaret Thatcher, behind all the nationalist fervour and pride lies an increasing dependency on the United States. Brexit has only intensified this contradiction. This is not to say that Britain is not a formidable imperialist power in its own right, with both the capacity and the political will to inflict serious bloodshed and misery wherever it feels it is in its interests. Coups in Bolivia, military exercises in Kenya, Somalia, and the South China Sea, and arms deals with Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the anti-China Indo-Pacific Pact, are just a handful of examples of this seemingly never-ending warmongering. Yet, whatever Truss and Sunak promise, even this is not enough to fend off Britain’s continual decline as an economic power.

Similarly, whilst transphobic discourses around ‘women-only spaces’ and ‘sex based rights’ continue to be mainstreamed by the media, and whilst it may appeal to a core base of Tory voters, constantly chomping at the bit for some form of reactionary outlet, it is not something the majority of voters care about. That the state feels increasingly called upon to intervene in trans discourse is a sign of the weakness of trans-antagonistic feminisms, not their strength; they need the state to provide the power they cannot find or organise towards among the public by themselves. Much as Mao described the United States as ‘very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody’, so too, the prominence of TERFS in the media, parliamentary politics, and even trade unions and the NGO sector, is really not indicative of any kind of popular support, let alone capacity for mass mobilisation or organisational ability. By contrast, trans people have long been a backbone of popular organising in a variety of movements, from housing rights and trade unionism to resisting police harassment and sexual violence. Forcing trans people into the centre of state-political discourse may well backfire on the state when they find, as has been demonstrated numerous times in recent years, that trans people can quite easily out organise their opponents on the streets and in our communities when we need to.

The increasing visibility of organising against the state in the streets is precisely the problem that the Tory leadership find themselves faced with, and precisely that to which they have no answer. In the past few years, the British state has been embarrassed multiple times by highly publicised acts of open defiance against the routine violence that sustains capitalism on these islands: the popular resistance to immigration raids at Kenmure Street and more recently in London and Manchester; the work of Palestine Action to shut down Israeli arms manufacturing; the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol; the Sisters Uncut action at Clapham Common that exposed the intimate links between the state and sexual violence; and, in Bristol again, the open uprising against the police sparked by those same intimate violences – all this, even prior to the wave of strikes ushered in by RMT this summer. In spite – or perhaps because? – of the defeat of Corbynism in the election of 2019, popular resistance to the state and capital has not subsided, but has continued to grow quietly, if now more diffusely than in a centralised parliamentary campaign. It is this slowly proliferating dissent that lies behind the increasingly aggressive reactionary stances of the Tory leadership. That it is largely lacking in substance outside of that same routine violence of racial capitalism Britain has relied upon, increasingly falteringly, for hundreds of years, indicates just how weak they are. As the Zapatistas’ Subcomandante Marcos has written, ‘Let not the roar from above drown out the murmur from below.’

But in the words of Amilcar Cabral, ‘Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.’ British capitalism has been in terminal decline for at least 50 years – for over a century by some estimates! – and so far it has only produced ever new variations on fascist counterinsurgency, rather than another world. We cannot ‘quietly outgrow’ a strong modern state, with a well-armed police force and far-seeing bureaucracy, that is constantly manoeuvring to encircle us. At present our movements are diffuse, uncoordinated, lacking strategy, and easily disorganised by petty concessions and compromises. They are especially easily disorganised by the strategic manoeuvres of global imperialism; it is an irony of the British Left that Corbyn and his key ally, John McDonnell, ‘headlined’ rival rallies for and against NATO intervention in Ukraine. A potential war with China over Taiwan will only exacerbate this. War has long been a key tool of capital in disarming movements at home in favour of ‘uniting the nation’ in a common cause.

The Tories are certainly paper tigers. But we have to continue to fight, to unite and build our struggles, to take back control and create new alternative relationships and movements for liberation on these islands. To destroy the paper tiger, as Mao said, like the wind and the rain, as consistent and as mobile as a new atmosphere of struggle, remains the crucial lesson of our times.