Andrew McKie: The rights and wrongs of labelling political parties

People have always disagreed about what is right and wrong, of course, and I suppose always will. But at least there are mechanisms – conscience, education, social mores, the law, religion, philosophy and, to confuse matters, “human rights” – through which we try to grope towards agreement.

By contrast, “the Right” and “the Left” are now as political designations so muddled as to render them useless, and probably meaningless – if they ever had any practical use or firm meaning.

I’m thinking of this because of the alarmingly successful showing of the Front National (FN) in the French Regional Elections. Marine Le Pen’s party got the largest share of the popular vote nationally, and won outright in six of the 13 regions of mainland France. Tactical voting and the united opposition of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicains and Francois Hollande’s Socialists should make the next round tougher, but there is a real possibility the FN will control three of those areas.

The FN is routinely described as Right-wing, hard-Right or far-Right. But its chief policies, besides restricting immigration, are protectionist measures for French workers, subsidies for traditional French industries, a rise in the minimum wage and reducing the retirement age to 60.

All of these are almost stereotypical Left-wing policies, if “Left” means government regulation and control – such as Labour’s former, and possibly future, advocacy of Clause Four – and “Right” means leaving them to the market.

The FN seems to be “Right-wing” solely on the basis that it is unpleasant and authoritarian. The FN is certainly both, but that tells us nothing about the division between Left and Right.

Some libertarians who identify with the Right, making individual liberty, property rights and the market their lodestars, occasionally attempt to point out Hitler’s party were called the National Socialists, and implemented measures based on the supremacy of the state over the individual. By this token, the Nazis were Left-wing.

I doubt this argument, though undoubtedly true as far as it goes, will ever really win. In any case, one could as easily point out genocide, forced labour, show trials and the secret police have as little to do with socialism (as interpreted by most socialists in modern democracies) as they do with the Right.

When it comes to autocrats, Stalin, Castro, Mao and Pol Pot claimed to be on the Left; Franco, Peron, and Pinochet, the Right. Hitler, Salazar and Mussolini denied being either. All were dictatorial gangsters.

Most people, especially those with the misfortune to live under those regimes, see that the labels make no difference; all were anti-democratic, characterised by arbitrary misuse of the law and oppression of individual freedom.

And most regimes were outspoken about immigration and foreigners, even when the borders were actually to prevent emigration. The East German regime, for example, insisted with a straight face that the Berlin Wall was to prevent Westerners from entering their Stasi-controlled paradise.

By that token, the FN, whether you call it Left or Right, is front-and-centre an unpleasant, authoritarian party. Marine Le Pen has tried to distance herself from her father Jean-Marie, who was quite openly anti-Semitic and chauvinistically nationalist – to the extent of expelling him from the party he used to lead.

She herself is socially liberal on abortion and gay rights (though the party would repeal same-sex marriage legislation) and has even tried to court Muslim voters. Amazingly, with some success; though the view of a female Muslim FN voter interviewed by the tabloid La Parisien – “She’s not like her father. She’s not 100% racist” – isn’t a ringing endorsement.

But no one really doubts the FN’s rise has been in large part due to the immigration crisis in Europe, disenchantment with established political parties, a distrust of corporations, especially in the financial sector, and a desire for increased security in the face of murderous terrorist attacks.

This is probably true of many other parties across Europe that present themselves as “grass-roots” movements; the majority are usually called Right-wing and nationalist, but the support for Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece taps into the same dissatisfaction.

On all such issues, these parties – repulsive and unappealing though so many of them are – have a point. The point, however, is not that their solutions to current popular concerns are right, in the sense of correct, but that they are unusual amongst politicians in voicing them.

Governments of both Left and Right have sold bail-outs of bankers and massive borrowing as either necessary intervention or laisser-faire; everyone other than the established parties can see it is no more than cronyism and special pleading, every bit as detrimental to the free market as it is to fairness or improving the lot of the poor. In the 1970s it was unions in nationalised industries extorting money from the taxpayer; now it’s financiers. Both are indefensible.

The solutions of Syriza and the FN are not only illiberal; they are infantile, unrealistic, and almost certain to make matters worse. But by raising the issue, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, they are already one-up on the political establishment, which goes some way to explaining their support.

My own conviction is that immigration is overwhelmingly a force for good and that offering asylum to those fleeing oppressive regimes is a moral duty. In part, that’s founded on a belief in individual freedom that includes the free movement of labour and absence of tariff barriers, and other notions associated with the free-market Right. It also seems to me to be empirically true that most immigrants are not a net cost – rather noticeably the reverse, actually – that they tend to enrich and not impoverish cultural life, and that only a very tiny proportion are a danger.

But it’s silly to ignore the fact some people do feel threatened, disadvantaged or culturally displaced by mass immigration; and it’s neither racist or unreasonable – even when they use words like “swamped” – of them to expect a debate.

Here the assumptions of bien-pensant liberals and advocates of multi-culturalism and moral neutrality have actually played into the hands of extremists; instead of acknowledging the concerns, but making a case for immigration (easily made, in my view, and as easily winnable), they have pretended any discussion of the issue was in itself objectionable.

While I think the need to fight – and I do mean literally, violently, as well as by conviction and reason – Islamist terrorism is obvious, it’s equally obvious that greatly curtailing freedom in the name of security is an assault on liberty as real, if not as absolute, as that they seek to impose.

What’s left to say? Just that there’s little point in calling the FN Right or Left, or thinking there is an intrinsic virtue, or coherent position to be found, in either label. If you doubt it, remember that “nationalist” is just as often used to label extremism in most European countries. Right and wrong, one can only hope, should still mean something when we cast a vote.