For a bit, people talked about nothing but ‘the red wall’. During the Corbyn years, people talked about little else. The problem was, apparently, how Corbyn could hold together ‘liberal’ voters in ‘cosmopolitan’ urban centres with the ‘traditional’ Labour base in what were euphemistically called “the towns”, that is, the belt of communities across Wales and the North of England that have born the brunt of deindustrialisation. Conveniently, according to most versions of this narrative, this demanded picking a side between progressive positions on immigration or gender and a commitment to ‘the working class’. This was of course largely an illusion produced by electoral fantasies, a kind of stand-in for the more generalised distance of Britain’s political class from the diverse popular classes it claimed to represent.
Knowsley, where fascists rioted outside a hotel where migrants were being legally confined last week, is supposedly a ‘red wall’ town. So is Warrington, where Brianna Ghey, a trans teenager, was stabbed a few days ago. Both are home to Labour safe seats.[1] There are less than twenty miles between them. Within a week of these incidents, a Black girl was attacked by a group of children and adults outside her school in Surrey, while teachers and other bystanders looked on, without intervening.
There is and will be a lot of discussion about what has happened in these cases. A lot of people will rightly blame the media for stoking up these forms of hatred and consistently misreporting on it even now. Others will rightly blame the current government and their rhetoric, and maybe their policies, for the street violence that mirrors the violence of the state. Violence doesn’t come from nowhere.
I’ve written before about how people talk about the north like it’s a colonial wasteland (click). This is of course just more imperial mythologising, but this does make it easier for commentators and politicians to separate the problem of deindustrialisation off from the rest of the country and its descent into fascism. For at least one hundred years, there was an informal deal between Britain’s industrial workers - up and down the country - and the ruling class, that workers’ organisations and institutions would be allowed to exist and even encouraged so long as they did not seek to resist the colonial relationships that created those industries in the first place. In pubs and churches and working men’s clubs, as well as in the streets and public parks and beaches, the working classes made their own social lives for themselves, social worlds and counter-publics of their own. We should not be too romantic about this. These social worlds were also produced by gendered labour, through women’s work in the private life of the home and the commercial sex work that marked the boundaries of the respectable working-class public sphere. Equally, these cultures remained marked by deprivation and poverty, but nonetheless, combined with the colonially-funded welfare state, they gave most working people some dignity and some security.
It was an uneasy deal but mostly it lasted, so long as industry remained profitable. The end of the Empire, the post-war economic crises, and increasing trade union and political rest, put an end to that. Now, thirty years later, the terms of the arrangement have shifted dramatically. The welfare state and the public spaces in which working class cultures thrived have shrunk rapidly, in many cases to near non-existence. These public spaces were always structured by forms of containment and diffusion whereby state violence redirected other violences towards respectable targets. What happens when you take such a neat containment of social violence and put pressure on it? Does the violence disappear like smoke? Or does it explode? And where does that explosion go, if not where it has always gone?
Focusing on transmisogynistic violence, this is not only a product of media frenzy or even of government rhetoric or policy. It is also the product of a social order in which gender coercively organises all public space, and thereby class relations. Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi eloquently described this coercion.
This tendency among males to harm any woman caught crossing the boundaries of her home, and therefore the outer limits prescribed for her by men, or who dares to break into and walk through domains reserved for men, proves that they cannot consider her as merely weak and passive. On the contrary, they look upon her as a dangerous aggressor the moment she steps over the frontiers, an aggressor to be punished and made to return immediately to the restrictions of her abode. This attitude bears within itself the proof of women’s strength, a strength from which man seeks to protect himself by all possible means. Not only does he imprison women within the house, but he also surrounds the male world with all sorts of barricades, stretches of barbed wire, fortifications, and even heavy guns.[2]
This violence and the public sphere it creates is fundamentally social - the fiction of biology is part of what makes it so easy to enforce. This is not only to say that transmisogyny is also about class, but also that class is about transmisogyny, as a key principle of social life. And as Saadawi (crudely) suggests, one form of containment reinforces others. The far-right warn that migrants threaten white women, and they are willing to back up that warning with as much force as they can muster. But their attacks are ultimately enforcing the boundaries marked by the state, by a whole range of institutions and practices that constitute what we call the border. This cuts through society as a whole, dividing the public sphere between citizen and alien, another division of labour and violence - including, for example, the forces that have confined migrants to these hotels in the first place. It is these interrelationships that make me worried about the possibility that some will see a police crackdown on knife-crime as a solution here. We need to consciously resist support for existing state strategies for suppressing Black and Asian communities, such as fear-mongering about knife-crime. There are less than twenty miles between Knowsley and Warrington.
To recognise these contaminants, this general social organisation, and its murderous results, demands a total social transformation, a different vision of social life. And that will require us to forge, nourish, and defend other kinds of counter-publics, outside the surveillance of the state, outside of the state’s hegemony over existing communities. These are the counter-publics that have always survived at the peripheries of social life, abject lumpen / intra-proletarians, mostly invisible and unsupported. Beyond the fantasies of the politicians or even many on the left, struggle continues. When our time comes, we will make no excuse for the terror.
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[1] Warrington South seems to largely go Tory.
[2] Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (Zed Books, 1980), p. 146-147.
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