Clacton, Farage and “buon senso”

In general, Marxists tend to be sceptical about the concept of common sense, but sometimes, like Antonio Gramsci, we recognise good sense (“buon senso”) as the rational core within common sense.

So, we agreed with the decision of Labour and the main parties (including the Greens) to boycott the by-election called by Nigel Farage in a brazen attempt to undermine the parliamentary enquiry into the £5m donation he secretly trousered from a crypto billionaire and to detract from the other byzantine financial scandals (often involving the convicted criminal "Posh" George Cottrell) now engulfing him and his Reform party.

As a result of mainstream parties’ refusal to play his game, Farage’s stunt has backfired hilariously. He will undoubtedly be re-elected, but his credibility and personal popularity have both plummeted.

One of the few non-Reform-supporting commentators to disagree with the boycott was one John McInally, writing in the Morning Star (16 July).

In a piece that seemed to endorse Farage’s claim that “state forces, including the BBC … now want to break him”, McInally denounced the boycott and the “liberal left” who [are] “associating themselves with this tactic.” McInally seemed to be particularly incensed by the involvement of the comedy candidate Count Binface, who, according to McInally “embodies” the Establishment.

Here’s a small taste of McInally’s polemic: “Socialists and communists should not endorse this wizard wheeze by a rotten political establishment that drives repression, cuts and privatisation, which is entirely subservient to corporate interests, including from the arms industry and with many taking donations from the Israeli ruling class.”

McInally does not explain to us how, exactly, the “Israeli ruling class” is involved in the Clacton boycott or the Binface candidacy. But what he is clear on is that the failure of the left to stand a candidate is a “scandal” that “history may remember as a real low point for the left [because] we are obliged to rely on a liberal comedian to fight our battle against a class enemy like Farage?”

Leaving aside the fact that at the time McInally’s piece was published no organisation or publication of the left had publicly supported Binface (though on 5 August the Morning Star itself did carry a piece backing Binface!) who in practice could and/or should have stood? Surely not the Communist Party of Britain (the people who control the Morning Star): they have no presence in Clacton and you can’t have a serious candidate without some people on the spot to campaign for the candidate. The SWP has organised some Stand Up to Racism activity in Clacton, but didn’t stand a candidate (they have a few contacts there but apparently no active members), and Clacton is a long way from London.

But the central argument remains a simple one: all a left or even Labour candidate in Clacton would have achieved would have been to give Farage’s stunt some credibility and increase the turnout. That’s simply “buon senso”.

By the way, John McInally comes from an ostensibly Trotskyist background (he was head honcho of the Socialist Party’s PCS operation in the days when they dominated the union). He is now a recurrent “feature” writer for the Morning Star. He writes frequently about the Ukraine war, and his support for Putin’s narrative is even more blatant than the paper’s official line.

In a previous piece (December 14 2023: “Built to fail: Nato is rapidly changing course on Ukraine”) he called for Ukraine to capitulate and put all blame for the war on, interchangeably, "the west", or "Washington", or the "US elite" or Nato, somehow linking it with "Biden's complicity in Israel's genocidal war in Gaza". The piece referred to "the US-backed Maidan coup", supported the pro-Russian Minsk accords and the regurgitated the discredited conspiracy theory about Johnson being "dispatched" by Biden to sabotage peace negotiations - all of which, together with the obvious approval with which he hailed the fact that "Global South nations increasingly conclude their interests lie with China and Russia in Brics" – clearly identified him as an ex-Trotskyist whose world view is entirely in line with the politics of the CPB: i.e. neo-Stalinism with a generous dash of Third Worldism.