The old left versus the new left: The UK Solidarity Story

A new documentary highlights the fair-mindedness of the old populist left -- and reminds me just how much solidarity woke ideology destroyed

A few months ago I watched a documentary about old social justice movements — and by old, I mean stretching back into the 19th century. It was made by a UK charity called WORLDWrite, which runs a “citizens TV school” that trains young people to make documentaries.

The UK Solidarity Story was released to the public today and can be watched in full on Youtube. I recommend it.

Anyone who’s been following me for a while knows the depth of my loathing for the left. But I once considered myself a leftie, I was raised by lefties, and I even did a stint — short and undistinguished, I’m glad to say — in the Socialist Worker’s Party. I think I would have moved away from the left anyway, just by the fact of getting older and therefore naturally more conservative. And operating a small business, which I did for several years, gave me surprising respect for Maggie Thatcher despite my youthful socialist leanings. Then, as the left moved towards woke totalitarianism, I became actively hostile to it.

This lovely little documentary was a reminder of what it was that made me consider myself of the left, way back when. It is a reminder of the populist left.

As you are all painfully aware, the online, new, left goes out of its way to gaslight its followers into believing that they are living among reactionary, racist, sexist, brutes. Men — white men — who hate women, hate blacks and immigrants, and hate gays.

Meanwhile on the other side, there is a lot of chatter online by anti-woke liberal intellectual types about the ‘woke right’ and ‘Christian nationalists.’ Whatever their genuine concerns, they often end up smearing ordinary people who have a sincere Catholic faith — to take one example — as being virtually the same as the crazy Jew-hating far right.

It’s all demoralisation for the common man and woman.

The documentary is an antidote to that demoralisation. There is nothing slick or artsy about it — and I mean that as a compliment. Its earnestness is entirely in keeping with its mission: to remind us of the good in our fellow man.

The UK Solidarity Story brings things back to basics. There is a long history of powerless people — of all religions, races, and nationalities — being oppressed by the powerful, and until very recently it was not that much more complicated than that. It was the widespread adoption of an ideology that assigned certain immutable characteristics to that class dynamic, with a view to consolidating power for the ideology’s adherents, that we got so thoroughly bamboozled.

The best thing about this documentary is that it shines a light on episodes that have not become part of the mainstream lefty canon. No reminiscing about the march on Selma, or attempts to make the IRA into working class heroes like the hot new Belfast “rappers” Kneecap. Not a celeb in sight. Here, the focus is on the humble, the unglamorous, and the mostly forgotten struggles of working men and women. Long, long, before it became trendy to do so.

For example, I did not know until watching this, that during the American Civil War, the cotton mill workers of Lancashire supported Lincoln’s struggle to free the slaves, even thought this directly and drastically impacted their own livelihoods.

It wasn’t just the mill workers either. “The Liverpool dock workers, every single one of them, refused to take pay for handling those shipments [of cotton]” Dr Cheryl Hudson says.

President Lincoln even wrote in 1863 to the people of Manchester to thank them for their support and sacrifice. Many British workers starved, partly as a result of the sea blockade, but also because of their strike action.

“The modern self belief is that reactionary ideas come from impoverished people, desperate people, who hate the other,” says James Heartfield, a London-based writer and lecturer. “And they project what are already prejudices back onto history.”

The Lancashire workers found a cause greater than their own self-interest: “they thought in larger, moral terms,” Heartfield explained. “[They] became powerful people, in their own right, they were respected. And they stood up, and they were seen.”

This working class pride and communal sacrifice did not disappear in the 20th century. Another episode I had never heard of was an industrial action taken by south Asian women workers at a film processing laboratory.

Their protest resulted in a mass picket in June 1977 when over 20,000 people showed up, including dockers, steel workers, miners.

“But the leadership of the trade union intervened, and effectively undermined what the women were doing, as did the trade union congress,” said retired history teacher Dennis Russell. “Trade union leaders act to defend the union more than they act to defend their members.”

Solidarity Story also includes some very interesting stuff on the gay rights movement in the 1980’s, including criticism from within of the politics of the gay rights movement. “If you didn’t go along with the prevailing line,” said Ceri Dingle, “you were some kind of anti-gay moron.” The prevailing line she was objecting to, was the public campaign to raise awareness of AIDS as a disease that affected everyone — which only caused the public to panic needlessly.

In a truly heterodox interview, another veteran of the gay rights movement, Don Milligan, describes how some of his fellow International Socialists objected to his being homosexual, and even had him kicked out of the party; while in his experience as an organiser, his flamboyant persona did not seem to phase the working men at all.

Milligan recalled of the gay radical activism: “The most important thing, the whole question was equality. We wanted equal rights. We wanted the same rights as everyone else in society. And that was the case that was made.”

Milligan articulates very well the transformation that happened to the left.

“The whole way people talk about this now is entirely different. When they talk about identity politics they’re talking about themselves, they’re talking about individuals. Modern identity politics is about subjective feelings… But there’s nothing you can do about that, because it doesn’t connect you with other people. Once the marriage thing went through, then we had equal rights, right across the board. And this has led to real confusion in the minds of people like Stonewall, which is one of the reasons why they’ve opted to go down the trans route — they didn’t have anything else to do.”

The press release that came along with the film asks an interesting question:

If class politics are no longer significant and ideas of ‘difference’ are all the rage, what does that mean for solidarity today?

And I’m afraid the answer is quite grim. The left has almost zero interest in real class politics now. Bernie Sanders is filthy rich. Keir Starmer openly states his preference for Davos over his own parliament. The American trade union leadership went for Harris. Their loathing of the working class is palpable.

Despite this — or because of this — the new left has grafted itself onto the older, populist, more fair-minded version, essentially stealing its slogans, its imagery and its rallying cries. It has put them in service of powerful forces that work to undermine, control, and ultimately destroy working and middle class people.

Many whom I know and love would consider the struggles of today — the ones they come out to protest wearing pussy hats or kaffiyehs — to be the seamless updates to the kind of fights detailed in Solidarity Story. But a fair analysis shows that to be false — or at the very least, one sided and myopic.

In reality, left wing solidarity has become a plaything for rich but talentless young people to use for clout; or a weapon bitter artists use to destroy their competition. And while I cannot stress enough how much more conservative I am in my politics and my values than these old school lefties, I can still see that this is a loss for regular people.

While the new, woke, lifestyle left carries out destruction on the ground, their leaders posture under a banner of solidarity. What they are actually working towards is centralised, dystopian control of a demoralised, desensitised, and most of all discordant population.

Thank you to the makers of A Solidarity Story for reminding us of the alternative.