Social democracy and its discontents: Race and class in the fallout of the UK general election
The hard-right has secured a victory in Britain. On 12 December, almost a third of the British electorate voted into power Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson: a man who has called Black people ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’, and niqab-wearing Muslim women ‘letterboxes’; written about Arabs with ‘hooked noses’ and ‘slanty eyes’; and derided gay men as ‘bumboys’. The elected Tory government is set to strengthen Britain’s hostile environment of arbitrary deportations, inhumane asylum detentions and racist labour hierarchies, in addition to initiating ‘legislative cleaning’ against Gypsies, Roma and Travellers. Johnson also seems committed to completing the transformation of Britain into a deregulated, low-tax haven for international finance capital, with workers’ rights and social security reduced to nothing.
At a time when fourteen million are living in poverty, while the number of resident billionaires has exceeded 150, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party – running on a social-democratic platform of moderate wealth redistribution and national planning – failed even to prevent a Conservative majority. Much of the media commentary on the election result has comprised gloating middle-class centrists blaming Corbyn for being ‘too radical’, when in reality, as argued below, Labour’s promises fell short of offering any convincing socialist alternative capable of overturning decades of anti-working-class policies in Britain. A more insidious narrative surrounding the election result is that Corbyn and the Labour left erred by subordinating ‘authentic’ class issues, supposedly represented by Brexit, to ‘identity politics’ and ‘diversity’. In particular, much of the left has bought into a false race-class dichotomy pitting a purported ‘traditional’ (i.e. white) working class against ethnic minorities. Most worryingly, too many leftists have abandoned the fundamental socialist question of working-class control of the state and economy, and internalised euphemistic far-/‘alt’-right rhetoric about ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the catchall of ‘postmodern identity politics’. The left must completely abandon conspiratorial populism, and seriously address the racial contradictions that exist within the working class (in addition to gender, sexuality and dis/ability differences), while emphasising the shared class interests in combatting austerity and the total capitalist system of wage-labour exploitation. Here, important lessons can be drawn from the British Black Power movement of the 1960s-70s.
Contradictions in the working class
In venting their frustration on social media immediately after the election, many Corbyn supporters played into the narrowly-homogenised construction of ‘the working class’, who they blamed for fecklessly voting Johnson into office against their own interests. The Conservative vote, though, beat Labour across all social grades: most markedly among the declining category of skilled manual workers, but least markedly among semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers, the unemployed and lowest grade workers (the so-called ‘precariat’). Significantly, some 15.5 million people – more than voted for Johnson – didn’t bother casting their ballot. While Labour got the vote of the youth, many of whom are facing decades of debt, precarious employment and insecure living arrangements, the election was also characterised by a strong racial divide – but this fact cannot be disentangled from class. Labour held 61 of the 63 most ethnically diverse seats, most of which are relatively deprived. It’s certainly the case that the white working class in the deindustrialised North and Midlands of England do not have (or owe) much loyalty to Labour. But the mainstream narrative of the ‘traditional’ working class ‘left behind’ is misleading and divisive. Omar Khan, director of the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, points out the simple reality that metropolitan working-class communities (as well as ethnic minority communities across the country) have been equally ‘left behind’:
London has some of the highest poverty, highest pollution, and largest working-class community in all of the UK. Seven of the top 11 local authorities in terms of child poverty are in London, while the capital records the highest level of air pollution in the country … Why aren’t the ethnic minority and migrant people who live in tower blocks and experience disproportionate levels of child poverty (rising to 59 per cent for Bangladeshi children) viewed as working class? Why aren’t those living in cities, or who die in preventable fires also ‘left behind’?
Those blaming ‘divisive’ identity politics for Labour’s defeat are often the same journalists and politicians participating in the disaggregation of the working class. Narratives pitting class against ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ arose simultaneously with the top-down construction of a homogenised ‘white working class’ identity, during New Labour’s regime of racial neoliberalism. As racialised minorities were subjected to heightened repression under the rubric of the ‘war on terror’, race equality discourses emphasised the minority of Black and Asian people achieving middle-class status, while ‘the working class’ was racialised as white (Kapoor, 2013, 1038-9). At the same time, New Labour launched an indiscriminate attack on the so-called ‘undeserving poor’, including its extension of workfare conditionalities and sanctions that even encompassed the disabled and mentally ill, and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) that imposed curfews on deprived neighbourhoods (Shilliam, 2018, 120).
The constriction of social security accelerated after the 2007/2008 financial crisis, and in the process the white working-class poor were vilified by the bourgeoisie in a language previously reserved for racialised minorities. Tellingly, in the aftermath of the 2011 London riots, historian David Starkey declared on BBC’s Newsnight that ‘the whites have become black’. The white working class are now routinely denigrated in popular media as aggressive thugs or bigots, while the fact that the white middle and upper classes are just as prejudiced is rarely, if ever, interrogated. The last few years have also witnessed the explosion of ‘poverty porn television’, reinforcing stereotypes of working-class laziness and ignorance. Many participants on Benefits Street (2014) claimed they ‘had been bribed and encouraged by Channel 4 bosses to exaggerate their lives to make “good TV”’. The racialised assault on proletarian dignity, coming on the back of the erosion of community and workplace bonds caused by deindustrialisation, helps explain the appeal of nationalism and white-identity politics in Britain’s former manufacturing regions, in the absence of any radical socialist politics capable of assuaging the basic grievances of the working-class poor, cutting across ethnicity lines.
Brexit, class volatility and the limits of social democracy
The right-wing of the bourgeoisie presented the 2016 vote to leave the European Union as the authentic ‘popular will’ of the same ‘left behind’ constituencies they themselves have denigrated. In March 2016, Secretary of State for International Trade, Liam Fox, a strong supporter of economic deregulation, opined that, ‘Everyone talks about the need for diversity and yet nobody seems to worry about poor white boys.’ The Right’s cynical appeal to white working-class identity politics is straightforward. For instance, wealthy broadcaster and Spiked contributor Julie Burchill claimed that ‘Brexit is the most genuinely working-class movement in Britain’, while likening the fictive ‘trans[gender] lobby’ to ‘wretched inner-city kids who shoot another inner-city kid dead in a fast-food shop for not showing him enough “respect”’.
Perhaps surprisingly though, much of the British far-left, including the Communist Party of Britain, a number of leading trade unionists, and Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leader Alex Callinicos, have also framed Brexit as an authentic working-class demand. In an immediate sense, it is undeniable that Brexit was partially an expression of working-class anger: carried by ‘several million workers who don’t usually vote but who seized on the referendum to register a protest against deteriorating social conditions and demonstrate their disenchantment with centre-left and centre-right mainstream politicians’ – in addition to the openly racist and anti-immigrant dimension. The opposing ‘Britain Stronger in Europe’ campaign was made on the basis of financial fear, including warnings of corporate flight and declining house prices; but ‘the threat of another economic recession had little purchase in the former industrial heartlands, which were still deeply mired in the last one’ (Fekete, 2019, 119). In their analysis of working-class support for Brexit, based on interviews with voters in the North East conurbation of Teesside, Luke Telford and Jonathan Wistow concluded: ‘The logic of capitalist realism – there is no alternative – had been internalised by the participants … They fully expected things to get worse, all they could do was adapt to the inequalities of neoliberalism.’ (Telford and Wistow, 2019, 12)
Left-wing Brexiters (‘Lexiters’), then, argue that Labour’s promise of a second referendum determined its loss of many Leave seats in Britain’s former industrial ‘heartlands’ in the general election. However, despite the media attention on the ‘left behind’, the 2016 Brexit vote ‘was disproportionately delivered by the propertied, pensioned, well-off, white middle class based in southern England, not the northern working class who have been more commonly held responsible for the outcome.’ (Bhambra, 2017, 215) The proportion of Leave voters in the lowest two social classes was just 24%. Remain also won ‘in most of the great working class regional capitals (Bristol, Cardiff, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.)’. The Tories’ 1.2% vote share increase in the 2019 election was as much to do with the intensified media attacks on Corbyn by Britain’s billionaire-owned press as it was about Brexit. Ultimately, the left faltered not by hesitating over Brexit, but in failing to confront the fundamental causes of universal working-class anguish.
Lexiters failed to transcend the terms of engagement set by the Right: the essential socialist question of working-class control and ownership of the state and economy was displaced with vague notions of foreign control. Lexiters have been correct to identify the imperialist and anti-working-class nature of the EU project, but on all other points of contention have been wrong. They have assumed that a Labour-led Brexit would have been a clean victory of workers over European finance capital. But under conditions of severe economic strain, and in the absence of any mass anti-capitalist movement, social democracy, which attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable interests of capitalists and workers, will side with the former: in the mid-1970s, the newly-elected ‘socialist’ Labour Party swiftly capitulated to the International Monetary Fund, accepting loans to bolster the financial sector in exchange for huge public spending cuts of over £3bn. (Clough, 2014, 164) And financial parasitism is an expression, not cause, of capitalist exploitation. Social-democratic Labour would not put the economy into the hands of workers, and a century of attempts at far-left entryism suggest the futility of a ‘two-step’ approach of electing a Labour government and then exerting ‘pressure’ on the Labour left to implement socialism. Given the conspicuous lack of any firm internationalism or radical critique of social democracy, Lexiters have played into the hands of chauvinists. Unsurprisingly, many Lexiters are openly xenophobic. Len McClusky, general secretary of Unite the Union (the largest affiliate of the Labour Party), has declared that ‘The next [Labour] leader needs to understand communities that gave birth to the labour movement, and realise that the whole country is not very like Labour London.’ Given the way metropolitan Labour has become synonymous with ‘diversity’, it’s clear which ‘communities’ McClusky thinks should be prioritised. McClusky’s views are unfortunately popular in the union movement; testament to the weakness of the present left on issues of internationalism and anti-racism. Stephen Ashe, who co-authored the Trades Union Congress report Racism Ruins Lives, found that ‘a significant number of white British trade unionists used the [‘Racism at Work’] survey to voice the same kind of political, media and academic arguments that orbit in and around Brexit with regard to the notion that the “white working class” is being “left behind”.’
Lexiters’ targeting of finance capital and ‘the City’ (of London), without connecting this to a fundamental Marxist critique of the capitalist state as the arbiter of exploitation (whether Labour or Tories are at the helm), has given predominance to vague notions of foreign control, not dissimilar to those promoted by the Right. In the Sun it was claimed that Corbyn’s ‘Marxist revolution’ failed because, against British ‘common sense’, it aligned ‘with the fashionable progressive elite, the party chiefs preferred globalism to patriotism, identity politics to immigration controls, transgender rights to toughness on crime.’ Here clearly ‘globalism’ refers not to capitalist globalisation processes, which Johnson rampantly supports, but far-right conspiracies of foreign domination and the erosion of patriarchal values. The ideological success of the Right in Britain has encouraged a trend towards ‘left-wing’ ultranationalism. The ‘Blue Labour’ advocacy group responded to Corbyn’s defeat by calling for ‘a socialism which is economically radical and culturally conservative’, and for ‘a patriotic, communitarian, one-nation party’, while lauding Jordan Peterson, an influential figure among the alt- and far-right. Immediately after the election, George Galloway, who once led the socialist Respect Party, launched his ambiguously-named Workers Party of Britain. This party’s programme declares that ‘obsession with identity politics, including sexual politics, divides the working class’, and calls for a ‘socialist system’ with ‘control of our borders, both physical and financial’. Galloway himself has engaged in rape apologia, made YouTube video rants about gender-neutral pronouns ‘offending the English language’, suggested that gender and race have nothing to do with class, and enacts a self-aggrandising, machoistic approach to politics (telling those who call out his bigotry to ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’). In the context of far-right resurgence throughout Europe and in North America, it is not unreasonable to point out the danger of this brand of ‘socialism’ coalescing as a ‘left’ wing of fascism.
The answer to Corbyn’s defeat is not a further capitulation to nationalism and right-wing conspiracy, but a complete transcendence of social-democratic illusions. Claims that a ‘return’ to centre-left politics is needed to stave off the hard-right are farcical. It was New Labour that abandoned the industrial working class. The years 1997-2010 saw a massive expansion of the financial sector, while manufacturing jobs declined from 4.5 to 2.5 million. Inequality further skyrocketed, and Britain fell from 15th place to 18th in the human development index. The problem with Corbynism was that it wasn’t radical enough, promising only to undo the damage of the last decade of Tory austerity. Labour’s proposed corporate tax rates were lower than current levels in Germany and France, and its pledge to build a million new houses over a decade was less impressive in the context of a social housing crisis in which a million new homes are needed immediately. Labour’s proposal to nationalise a few industries is unlikely to have been accepted as any sustainable social security advancement, by workers who have lived through the experience of denationalisations and job losses.
Most damning, since Corbyn’s leadership of the party, Labour councils across the country have continued to implement austerity, while holding steadfast to a ‘blame Tory cuts’ line. ‘Councils in Ealing, in west London, Bristol, Brighton and Cardiff – all of them Labour – have washed their hands of their statutory duty to homeless families by rehousing them in repurposed shipping containers that are like saunas in the summer and freezers in the winter.’ Corbyn supporters mourning the ‘inexplicable’ defeat of Laura Pidcock, the ‘anti-austerity’ candidate for North West Durham, are presumably unaware that as councillor for Northumberland she voted for £36m worth of cuts in 2017-20.
If Labour never presented sufficient plans to restructure the economy in line with working-class needs, it also failed to really challenge the logic of racial neoliberalism; appearing benevolent on ‘race’ issues only in comparison to Tory populism. Despite all the rhetoric of ‘diversity’ from both its supporters and detractors, Corbyn’s Labour upheld the anti-immigration status quo and, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise and Die Linke in Germany, remained firmly within the tradition of ‘nativist’ social democracy. In 1978 a London-based Black Power group, the Race Today Collective, reflected on Labour’s anti-immigrant record and recent assault on the trade union movement, and lamented how the British radical left was perpetually enmeshed in ‘the struggle between the conscience and reality of the Labour Party.’ (Race Today, 10:6, 1978, 129) Only a month after meeting survivors of the Grenfell Tower Fire (in which many of the victims were migrants, including from North Africa), Corbyn gave legitimacy to nationalist sentiments, arguing on the The Andrew Marr Show against the ‘wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy the conditions, particularly in the construction industry’, in favour of jobs ‘in the locality first’. It should also be remembered that, in a country with a greater proportionality of incarcerated Black people than in America, it was Corbyn’s Labour that first proposed reversing cuts to the police force, and then exceeded Johnson’s promise of 20,000 extra officers. Labour’s 2019 manifesto further stressed the ‘national security’ framing that has underpinned the repression and demonisation of racialised minorities in Britain. The Institute of Race Relations has shown that in 1991-2015, at least 509 people from Black and Minority Ethnic, refugee or migrant communities died ‘in suspicious circumstances in which the police, prison authorities or immigration detention officers have been implicated’, revealing ‘patterns of control or care which suggest … forms of direct or indirect racism.’ Nativist social democracy is anathema to the true spirit of socialism; the internationalism of workers and oppressed peoples.
Lessons from the British Black Power movement
The same socially-conservative left that exploits contradictions in the working class has taken an especially derisive attitude towards intersectionality. In simple terms, intersectionality is a framework for foregrounding the interplay of race, class, gender, sexuality and dis/ability. A Marxist approach to this centres class as the overarching structuring relationship, and particularly emphasises how imperialism raised up ‘race’ and gender hierarchies, which in turn shaped the development of capitalism. As Ashley Bohrer points out, ‘the foundational theorists of intersectionality — Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, the Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, and Beverly Smith — treat capitalism and exploitation as central to an intersectional analysis’ (Bohrer, 2019, 14). Yet when organised socialists have discussed intersectionality, they have often failed to seriously engage with such theorists, instead dismissing the concept outright as a brand of postmodern liberalism. Obviously, there are liberal iterations of identity politics and intersectionality, under the rubric of which some minorities are co-opted into the exploitative capitalist system. The induction of a few minorities into the unequal channels of ‘upward mobility’ has diverted attention away from the task of social alleviation for the majority of the Black and Asian working class, and newer migrant workers. The poorest Asian and Black families in Britain have been hit hardest by austerity measures, both suffering a drop in living standards of 20%. But dismissing intersectionality, or various struggles against oppressions not automatically covered by the ‘traditional’ class struggle, wholesale as ‘un-Marxist’ is as absurd as equating the socialist feminism of Angela Davis with the neoliberal feminism of Hillary Clinton.
In their myopic dogmatism, many socialists have begun parroting the conspiratorial rhetoric produced by the far-right magazines Spiked and The Spectator. It is becoming increasingly clear that when certain leftists, including the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), attack ‘post-modern identity politics’ they are not actually referring to the postmodernist (and anti-Marxist) academic turn during the 1990s. Rather, this is a ‘dogwhistle’ signalling their short-sighted opposition to struggles that go beyond the immediate worker-boss antagonism: struggles that specifically address racism, sexism, anti-LGBTI+ oppression and discrimination against the disabled. In the case of the CPB and the socialist Morning Star newspaper, this position is used to justify vitriolic attacks on transgender people. A variation of the dogwhistle is used by fascists, who now refer to Jordan Peterson’s formulation of ‘postmodern neo-Marxism’ as a catchall to describe anyone challenging their patriarchal, white supremacist ideology.
Sara Ahmed has usefully explained the incoherence of leftists like Slavoj Žižek who counterpose working-class politics to cultural diversity. The reality is that multiculturalism, associated in Britain with New Labour, was never the dominant ruling-class ideology; rather, the ‘speech act that declares liberal multiculturalism as hegemonic is the hegemonic position’:
The explicit argument of New Labour [was] that multiculturalism went ‘too far’: we gave the other ‘too much’ respect, we celebrated difference ‘too much’, such that multiculturalism is read as the cause of segregation, riots and even terrorism … We have a double fantasy here: both that migrants were respected or received with love (as a description of the history of race politics in the UK [I] suspect we are talking here about history as a national fantasy, or the nation as a historical fantasy), and then that this love was abused.
The left must reconfigure its understanding of the ‘traditional’ working class. As labour historian Satnam Virdee has argued, ‘we need to stop thinking about the English working class as a single entity; it was made up of many ethnicities, of men and women but occupation and skills levels stratified it. Both racism and anti-racism were present in the making of the English working class.’ Undoubtedly, as Lenin recognised, the relative wage advances and consumption subsidies that were facilitated by British colonial plunder abroad engendered a material basis for national chauvinism, and for the racist defence of narrow ‘sectional’ interests, among the white working class. In the interwar years, there were violent pogroms in multiple port cities, including Liverpool and Cardiff, targeting Black and Asian seamen. But this is just one half of the story. During the American Civil War, many mill workers in Manchester and Lancashire supported the cause of anti-slavery despite the region’s reliance on cotton imports: ‘In workers’ meetings across the region, people recognised that they had common cause with the enslaved workers who picked the cotton that fed their looms’. Formed in 1920, the early Communist Party of Great Britain comprised not only Anglo-Saxon workers, but also many from the Celtic fringe, as well as Jews and radicals from Britain’s colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
The problem is that the mainstream socialist left has vacillated between assuming that the white working class is spontaneously anti-racist, or inherently racist. With the former assumption, references are made to heroic moments like the anti-fascist Battle of Lewisham in 1977, or the mass trade union support for the strike at Grunwick film-processing plant in 1976-8 led by Asian women. But this solidarity didn’t appear out of thin air. Racist sentiments in Britain were fuelled by the abrupt end of the post-war economic boom, and throughout the 1970s the fascist National Front achieved a significant foothold among white workers. Proletarian solidarity, including the participation of tens of thousands of workers in the anti-fascist movement, was a long time in the making, with a critical role being played by Black Power militants (including many South Asians, who adopted a politicised ‘Black’ identity). British Black Power groups fought community-based battles against racist immigration controls and police brutality, drawing attention to prejudice within the white working class; but many Black radicals were simultaneously committed to building alliances with white workers to transform and radicalise trade union structures – despite being denigrated by the main socialist parties as ‘black separatists’. Black radicals recognised that white workers’ racial identity was blinding them to ‘the future of a leaner and meaner nation-state’ and emphasised the shared need for a revolutionary anti-imperialist politics. (Narayan, 2019, 956) This perspective was not exclusive to Black radicals: the Race Today Collective received a letter from a white Londoner, declaring that ‘Working class power in West London during the past 20 years has been black power. From the many struggles fought, whites have gained greatly – a new self-respect, a militancy in the young, a readiness to stand up for ourselves as tenants, claimants or whatever.’ (Race Today, 8:3, 1976, 67) In the years leading to Lewisham and Grunwick, Black radicals and white socialist allies spoke to workers, produced political propaganda and organised several anti-racist trade union conferences. Crucially, advances came when socialists accepted the particularities of oppressions, rather than subsuming contradictions within the working class with facile slogans like ‘one race the human race’, or ‘black and white unite and fight’.
Spreading anti-racist class consciousness was never easy, and our anti-imperialism today cannot remain abstract. In their survey of working-class supporters of the fascist English Defence League (EDL), Simon Winlow et al. came across ‘Colin’: ‘I wasn’t responsible for fucking slavery. I didn’t fucking benefit! Lots of fucking MPs, their ancestors did. Mine would’ve been fucking hauling coal, would’ve been more like the slave than a slave owner.’ (Winlow et al., 2017, 132) Vague invocations of ‘white privilege’ would not be an especially convincing rebuttal to this; what’s required is sustained and patient socialist education about structural racist discrimination in the labour market and in social service provision (and not forgetting that the welfare state itself was a racialised construct, serviced by hyper-exploited workers, especially women, from former British colonies); and how this all relates to Britain’s ongoing imperialist exploitation of the Global South – all while emphasising common working-class interests against the bourgeoisie. This difficult task is eschewed by a certain strand of anti-imperialism in the west which writes off the socialist potential of the Global North working classes. For instance Zak Cope, in his recent book The Wealth of (Some) Nations, discusses ‘the fundamentally bourgeois class structure of Britain’ (Cope, 2019, 195) at a time when one-fifth of the population are living in poverty, while nearly 60 per cent of low- and middle-income households have no money set aside; an increase of a quarter since the last financial crisis. The majority of wage-earners in Britain have more interests in common with each other than with the ruling class.
Black radicalism, like other anti-capitalist movements, was eclipsed in the 1980s through a combination of repression and co-option. Today, the Labour Party’s electoral ‘black hole’ has swept up and defanged many of the new radical extra-parliamentary movements that have emerged to confront austerity, racist border controls and the threat of climate destruction. With the seeming death of Corbyn’s progressive reforms, social movements should take stock and recognise the need to rebuild working-class power outside the stifling bounds of social democracy. Socialism is not a ‘zero sum’ politics, where a gain for one is a loss for others: if encompassed within the overarching struggle against capitalist austerity and the total system of wage-labour exploitation, battles against racism, transphobia, misogyny and ableism etc. will only strengthen working-class unity. The inexorable rise of the Right leaves little room for misrecognition of this point.
To paraphrase the late socialist and Black Power activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan, the Tories have stolen UKIP and the EDL’s clothing, lending orthodoxy to fascist thinking and softening up the white working class for fascist blandishments and fascist ideology. In the four weeks following the EU referendum, over 6,000 racist hate crimes were reported to the police, and the election of an openly racist prime minister will further embolden fascistic violence. Johnson’s new government has been endorsed by the far-right fringe, including media personality Katie Hopkins, who once tweeted that “Racial profiling is a good thing, call me racist. I don't care”, and former EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (alias Tommy Robinson). Socialists will have to seriously think about what the election of a hard-right populist government means in a country that is highly militarised and securitised. Economic crisis, exacerbated by Brexit, will likely tip many deprived urban areas into social collapse, and conceivably spark further uprisings like those in 1980-1, 1985, 1999, 2001 and 2011. During previous ‘riots’ there were sometimes explicit tensions between white and racialised minority working-class communities, but more typical was shared anger against the bourgeoise. One thing is certain: socialists must confront racism head on, and foster working-class unity in all its diversity, while refusing to temper our criticism of capitalism.
The last word goes to Sivanandan:
There are still the values and traditions that have come down to us from the working-class movement: loyalty, comradeship, generosity, a sense of community and a feel for internationalism, an understanding that unity has to be forged and reforged again and again and, above all, a capacity for making other people’s fights our own – all the great and simple things that make us human.