You vaguely assume that if a leftish MP loses their seat they move onto a job as a union bureaucrat or working for some type of progressive charity. What you don’t expect is that they get a new gig as one of Nigel Farage’s useful idiots on GB News. That’s the sort of job you feel belongs by rights to George Galloway.  

To the extent that Lloyd Russell-Moyle was on my radar, it was due to the positive work that he did with Another Europe is Possible, the socialist anti-Brexit coalition which defended freedom of movement and recognised Brexit as a project of the English nationalist right.  

Not being a viewer of the self-styled GB News on account of it being the modern British version of Der Stürmer, I was more than slightly surprised to see the former Labour MP popping up on Twitter shooting the breeze with Farage. Being of a charitable disposition I assumed that he has bills to pay, and he’d be doing that Leninist thing of speaking about socialism from a dung heap. 

What I didn’t expect was that he’d be defending Israel’s use of explosive devices in Lebanon, arguing, in the face of all the facts, that blowing people up in shops, streets, funerals and family homes was justified. He describes it as “targeted killing of belligerents” and it’s left to Farage to comment that children were killed too, an objection Russell-Moyle brushes off.  

Naomi Klein discusses this movement of people from the left to and active engagement with the extreme right in Doppelganger borrowing from the ideas of William Callison and Quinn Slobodian. It is originally a German concept Querdenken, which she describes as “diagonal, or outside-the-box thinking. 

Callinson and Slobodian write: 

“Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.” 

Klein goes on to describe precisely the function that people like Russell-Moyle fulfil when they appear on migrant baiting, far right platforms like GB News and why Farage and Bannon platform him or Naomi Wolf: 

“…it is important for these movements to present themselves (and to believe themselves to be) ruptures with politics-as-usual; to claim to be something new, beyond traditional left-right poles. That’s why having a few prominent self-identified progressives and/ or liberals involved is so critical. Importantly, the role of these progressives is not to renounce the goals of social justice and embrace a hard-right worldview.” 

A useful aphorism in the Brexit years was “not everyone who supports Brexit is a racist, but every racist supports Brexit”. Other than the vanishingly small number of people who have to watch it for professional reasons, it is a safe bet to assume that every GB News viewer is a racist and based on what we know of the age profile of its viewers, they’re all too old to be likely to change their mind. People on the left who choose to appear on it either for cash or a delusional belief in their powers of persuasion are being played for fools by Farage.