After the election do UK Conservatives Go Still Further to the Right?
Last week canvassing in St John’s Wood, a middle class London districts I was confronted by an emotional middle aged white woman voter who kept insisting that there were too many Muslims in Britain (she called them ‘Muslins’, the thin dress fabric).
I politely pointed that 2nd and 3rd generation British Muslims were doctors, dentists, accountants, nurses, teachers, ran businesses and made as much a contribution to our nation as British Jews or British Catholics. She was not to assuaged and insisted the “Muslins” were taking over the country and she would not vote for a party that refused to accept this fact.
It was just one talk with a voter. I first reported a British general election for the BBC in 1970 and first stood for Labour in the 1974 election. In the intervening years I have been dismayed at the way politicians including mainstream Conservative ones have used race and immigration to try and win votes.
However I really should not be surprised at the right’s use of racist tropes, slogans, slurs and proclamations by politicians aimed at dividing British citizens and residents of the UK one against the other.
Liberals and the left also have a dark history of anti-immigrant hostility but it has been the right and the right wing press that have most often indulged in open xenophobia and racism.
In the 1930s, the Daily Mail regularly ran articles arguing against letting Jewish refugees from continental Europe into Britain. They were accused of taking over professions like medicine and dentistry. The Daily Mail supported the British Union of Fascists and even printed its Kings Road office address so that anti-refugee activists could sign up.
30 years later Enoch Powell, a Conservative MP, raised the spectre of “rivers of blood” flowing in Britain on account of immigrants arriving to do jobs white Englishmen were disinclined to do.
In 1964, a Tory candidate in the West Midlands, handed out general election leaflets saying “If you want a N…. r Neighbour vote Labour.” He was not disowned by the Tory High Command and defeated the sitting Labour MP, the Shadow Foreign Secretary.
Four years’s later Powell called for a “repatriation” of immigrants who would have included the parents of Rishi Sunak or Suella Braverman. The rightwing Tory group, the Monday Club, set up an Immigration and Repatriation Committee. Its secretary was John Bercow, a young far-right student Conservative at a time when the Federation of Conservative Students at their conferences wore T-shirts saying “Hang Mandela!”.
In 1978, Margaret Thatcher openly dog-whistled to Tory racists when she told a television interviewer that Britain faced being “swamped by people of a different culture".
The culture metaphor was reprised by Nigel Farage when he said Rishi Sunak ‘was not "patriotic" and did not understand "our culture".’
Fast forward to today and you have Suella Braverman saying “White English girls were being raped by gangs of British Pakistani men”. In fact, 82 per cent of all men in prison for sex crimes are white British. Braverman knows that most Brits know Pakistani origin British citizens are Muslim.
Braverman who has taken part in European far-right gatherings this year with the French racist nationalist Eric Zemmour who ran as a far-right candidate in the 2022 presidential election in France also uses the word “invasion” to describe immigrants in Britain much as Enoch Powell worked up anti-immigrant political hate in the era of her parents arriving from East Africa in the late1960s.
Now statements are emerging from the candidates handpicked by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice to stand for their quaintly named “Reform Party” which is treading on the toes of the Conservatives in many constituencies according to opinion polls.
Farage has no programme of reform in the normal sense of this political describer. He is whipping up xenophobic, anti-Muslim, hostility to immigrants of any description. He broke into British politics with his campaigns after his election as an MEP for the UKIP Party in 1999 against European citizens who came to work in Britain’s health service, as carers, child-minders, agricultural and delivery workers and to do the low-paid public sector work that the true-born, white Englishman and woman prefer not to do.
The Conservative Party used Farage to attack the pro-European Tony Blair and Labour ministers 1997-2010. A regular call by Farage was for a referendum on EU membership which David Cameron conceded in 2009. Cameron and Nick Clegg, his Liberal Democratic de facto joint prime minister in the 2010-2015 coalition perhaps hoped that in bowing to Farage’s demand for a referendum which was also strongly supported the big circulation papers like the Daily Mail, Sun, Daily Telegraph as well as anti-European writers on the Guardian and amongst nationalist Labour MPs they would kill off the idea of Britain leaving Europe and burst the Farage balloon.
It didn’t work. Cameron and Clegg were booted out of politics after their plebiscite was seized by anti-European populist forces who believed leaving the most consequential treaty in Britain’s international history was an Open Sesame to growth, investment, a docile labour force, and other items on a right-wing wish list.
Eight years on from the Brexit vote and Britain’s economy measured by most global standards is smaller, weaker, and the nation is marginalised. Instead of spelling out these truths the Tories, and other political parties hide behind the illusion that modern British economic and trade isolationism can be “made to work” – a metaphor used by both Theresa May and the likely incoming Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer.
In the meantime Nigel Farage has formed a group of acolytes to stand in the election on 4th July. Many of them have a track record of racist hostility to Muslim or join with Farage in admiring Vladimir Putin and criticising the alliance which opposes his invasion and part-annexation of Ukraine.
Reform candidates have been revealed to be former members of the British National Party an openly anti-semitic and racist white supremacist party that won a handful of council and MEP seats after 2000.
In October 2023 Reform’s candidate for Bournemouth West, Ben Aston tweeted that “Jews (are) agitating” to import “third-world Muslims” into the UK and the Tory government was deliberately “injecting” Britain with African men.
Jack Aaron, who is standing against the defence secretary, Grant Shapps, tweeted in 2022 that Hitler was ‘brilliant’ at using specific personality traits ‘to inspire people into action’. He said President Putin’s use of force in Ukraine was ‘legitimate’.
Reform’s candidate in Salisbury Julian Malins proclaimed: ‘I have actually met Putin and had a 10-minute chat with him and he seemed very good. He is not the Austrian gentleman with a moustache come alive again.’
Pete Morris, Reform’s candidate in the Leicestershire constituency of Melton and Syston told his local paper the coronavirus had been manufactured and released so the pharmaceutical industry could make billions from ‘potentially harmful so-called vaccines’.
According to the Daily Mirror Mark Butcher, the Reform candidate for Blackpool South, is keen on conspiracy theories. His You Tube channel included the claim that the CIA made television sets that put people to sleep so they would not hear about various conspiracies.
The post-election question remains. Will the far-rightists, Putin fans, racists, Muslimphobes, and conspiracy theorists who now constitute the Reform party take over the Conservative Party after their defeat next week?
Assuming Sunak goes he will be the fifth prime minister to be swallowed up by the Brexit revolution in less than a decade. It is an old saying that revolutions devour their children. Never in British political-parliamentary history has a major upheaval in British politics such as is the Brexit era political upheaval resulted in so many destroyed careers and reputations.
So once in opposition will the Tories keep surrendering the centre ground to Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens or in Scotland, the SNP and reform themselves into the Reform Party. Or will they seek again to be a party and future government firmly rooted in the centre-liberal-right and repudiate the populist demagogy against immigrants, Europeans, and Britain’s political tradition of compromise and political inclusion?