Michael Gove, the Education Secretary who looks perpetually like a rebuked child, said of Eric Hobsbawm in 2008 that ‘only when (he) weeps tears for a lifetime spent serving an ideology of wickedness will he be worth listening to.’ Thankfully he has not repeated these remarks in the last few days. This perhaps proves that he has slightly more subtlety about his extreme right wing views than he has been given credit for, putting him somewhere in the region of an elephant on ice or Anne Widdecombe in a ballroom.  For Hobsbawm, who died this week aged 95, these were interesting times. An unrepentant Marxist throughout his life he had recently expressed hope that the current financial crisis would lead to a reversal in the stagnation of intellectual Marxism that has occurred in the last two decades. However Hobsbawm was more of a realist than Gove gave him credit for; even the great historian himself conceded as far back as the 1970s that the era of true Marxist politics in Britain had faded away with a whimper.

Thirty years ago a student protest in Britain would have inescapably been a Marxist affair. Communal sing-alongs of ‘The Red Flag’, repeated use ‘Comrade’ as a greeting and public readings of Das Kapital would have no doubt have been seen alongside the normal yelling and bawling.  The most red seen in the 2010 student protest movement was the glimpse of a fire extinguisher flying from the roof of Milbank tower, or perhaps the anger and disbelief on the faces of the rest of Britain as the son of a multi-millionaire rock star pissed on the cenotaph. This is not to say that the protest were not without merit. Students have undeniably been let down by the current government. The attempts of the coalition to bring the economy back to life having been less successful than the experiments of Frankenstein. However while a hard-core of the protestors, presumably those willing to recreate Butlin’s outside St Paul’s, held Marxism close to their hearts they were a clear minority.   Most of those students up in arms though seemed to be disenfranchised Liberal Democrat voters (god knows there is a lot of us), or distraught Labour supporters disdaining their party’s choice to run with a candidate with anger management issues and a propensity to insult pensioners, as opposed to card carrying Marxists.

Similarly the opposition that has been seen to more recent spending cuts has not been framed in particularly left wing rhetoric. The odd heckler shouting about ‘Tory scum’ or making repeated jibes about Old Etonians aside, few in either the press of politics are arguing for nationalisation or a resurgence of the unions. In fact the most common response to the purchase of RBS by the previous government was dismay, ‘Why are we bailing out the banks, and assisting the idiots who started this, let the strong, sensible institutions survive and allow the foolish and week ones to fail .’ Economic policy hardly comes more right wing than that. Certainly our hatred of bankers has led a renaissance for cockney rhyming slang; however it has been clear for a long time that a party that stood upon a platform of truly left wing ideals would be unelectable in Britain. While Tony Blair’s initial popularity, and for that matter Cameron’s inability to acquire a majority in 2010 both show that many of us are deeply uncomfortable with the pantomime villain politics of the Conservatives we are yet to see a resurgence of a socialist party, and we almost certainly won’t.

This not to say that Marxism is dead in British society completely, a quick look at the LUU website will tell you that it is not the case, but it is undeniably a far more marginalised view point than it once was and now holds very little sway in mainstream politics. Hobsbawm knew this; he was more than willing to work with the Labour party while they were in power to redress the national curriculum for instance, because he recognised that they represented the closest electable party to his set of beliefs. There is still scope in politics therefore, for an unrepentant Marxist, but not an unrealistic one.