By Jock Mulligan
John Gray. The man with the brain the size of a planet and the outlook of a particularly thoughtful grave-digger. He’s the anti-utopian prophet, the constant Cassandra who shouts about the failure of progress while we’re busy texting on our new smart devices. He’s brilliant at diagnosis, but when he touches prescription, that’s where the wheels come off, and the whole grand project starts looking rather hypocritical.
Let’s tear into the tragedy of John Gray, the philosopher who supported a chaos that precisely mirrored the thing he spent his life hating.
The Anti-Progress Prophet: Gray’s Brilliant Diagnosis of Failure
Gray’s genius lies in his critique of the very idea of liberal progress. He looks at the modern world and sees a series of secular, political religions dressed up as pragmatic governance. He argues that from the very beginning, Thatcher, Blair, and Cameron were all pursuing the same dangerous, utopian myth: the belief that the global market and liberal democracy were the end of history, and that all friction and local identity must be smoothed away for the sake of efficiency.
He rightly condemned Thatcher for her radical, wrecking-ball neoliberalism, which destroyed old working-class communities in the name of a global market utopia. He poured scorn on Blair’s “ethical foreign policy” and his third-way fantasies, seeing them as merely the progressive face of the same destructive globalist project. And he dismissed Cameron’s Conservatism as a hollow, privileged attempt to manage the wreckage without understanding the depth of the disaster.
Gray’s critique is vital for the Left: he exposed how the system we inherited—from Thatcher through to Blair—was not pragmatic, but ideological, driven by a faith in perpetual growth and global convergence. He laid bare the moral vacuum at the heart of the centre ground.
The Brexit Betrayal: Wrecking the World to Save It
But here’s the knot in the rope, the moment where the anti-utopian falls into his own trap. When the Brexit vote came along, Gray, the man who despised the radical, destructive idealism of Thatcher, found himself supporting a project of radical, destructive idealism.
He saw Brexit not as a spasm of economic nationalism, but as a necessary, anti-globalist revolt; a pragmatic return to the nation-state, acknowledging the failures of the EU’s liberal project. But the Left must see the material reality: the act of leaving was the ultimate expression of the Thatcherite wrecking mentality.
Thatcher smashed the unions and the old industries because she believed that destruction was necessary to clear the ground for her utopian free market. She sacrificed the stability she believed in for ideological purity (probably by mistake… a mistake that impoverished millions of people, and thousands of communities). Gray, in supporting Brexit, was endorsing an equally chaotic, destructive act of dismantling—tearing up the economic and social fabric of the Union and the UK’s relationship with its largest trading bloc, all in the name of escaping a phantom European “progress.”
The Thatcher Paradox
The fatal flaw is the Thatcher Paradox: Gray hates the globalist world she created, but he endorsed the method she used to create it. He supported the radical dismantling of the institutional framework (the EU and its associated trade and governance stability) without any credible, materialist plan for what would come next.
The result? Instead of a peaceful, anti-utopian retreat to the secure nation-state, Brexit has delivered a rolling state of right wing Tory chaos: economic instability, regulatory confusion, internal constitutional crisis (Scotland, Ireland), and a government perpetually trapped in the rhetoric of past glory. The chaos of Brexit is simply the reactionary echo of the chaos Thatcher unleashed in the 1980s. Gray, the supposed voice of anti-utopian realism, became an unwitting cheerleader for a process that intensified political instability and worsened the material conditions of the working class he claims to care about. He prescribed chaos to cure the disease of idealism.
The Left Coalition Prophecy: Hope or Resignation?
Finally, we come to his current prediction: that the years of conservative rule, driven by this post-Brexit chaos, will inevitably lead to a left-of-centre coalition government in Britain.
Now, this prediction might well come true, but we must ask if it’s based on socialist analysis or fatalistic resignation. Gray predicts a Labour-led government not because of a powerful, organized working-class movement, but because the right-wing has run out of rope and the system is exhausted. It’s an outcome born of decay, not of revolution.
The Left can take a small piece of comfort from his analysis: the neoliberal project, in all its forms, is collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions, just as he said it would. But our lesson from the Geis (see my previous essays) —that idea of unyielding moral law—must be this: we cannot rely on the enemy’s failure alone. We must not be the party that merely sweeps up the ruins left by Thatcher and the Brexit zealots.
We must build our movement not on the cynical expectation of a system collapse, but on the positive, unwavering Geasa of equality and justice. We need a vision for a planned, equitable economy—a true, socialist alternative, not just a caretaker government formed from the wreckage.
Gray is in all probability right about the collapse, but the Left must ensure that the resulting government is a force for material change, not just a slightly kinder manager of inevitable decline.
