Extremism sweeps the British right

Trump envy, mudbloods and the new fanaticism

Photo by Daniel Adesina on Unsplash

Something macabre is stirring in the soul of the British right. Driven half mad by the failure of Brexit and Liz Truss, it has doubled down on fanaticism. It prefers to push harder and faster to the extremes than face its own shortcomings.

Ideas that Conservatives themselves would once have dismissed as fascistic now produce barely a mumble of dissent. 

Mass deportations are floated– and not just for illegal immigrants. There is talk of exploiting anti-Muslim bigotry, and of abolishing the BBC, European Convention on Human Rights, civil service impartiality,  and all other potential checks on right-wing power. And, increasingly and without a blush of shame, the right fantasises about a blood-and-soil version of English nationalism that Conservatives once abhorred.

Apparently you cannot be English unless your parents, grandparents, great grandparents and who knows how many more generations back before them were English as well.

In short, the worst of right is toying with a future where a British version of Trump’s ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) harasses law-abiding citizens while weaselly little fanatics with clipboards and YouTube channels demand to know your gran’s racial origins.

To give you some idea of how high it goes, guess the name of this shrieking fanatic.

“The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.”

It might have been a member of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. Or some porn-addled incel screaming abuse from his cellar in the 2020s.

 As it turns out, it is Dominic Cummings, a former adviser to Boris Johnson and the architect of Brexit.  Every British institution is a cancerous growth that must be killed before it kills us, he now tells us, apart from the Brexit Cummings delivered– at a  cost to the UK of £140 billion (and counting).

As we shall see Cummings and those like him are now so far gone they attack Nigel Farage from the right  for being too old and soft to embrace mass deportations. Cummings would rather go to any extreme than take responsibility for his own actions. He’d rather damn the whole world than damn himself.

He is hardly alone in that.

A large part of the explanation for the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism lies in the inability of Conservatives  to face up to the mistakes of 2010 to 2024 –  from austerity to Truss via Brexit. But intellectual cowardice cannot on its own explain the debacle. As conservatism fell apart in the UK,  Donald Trump and his ally turned enemy Elon Musk triumphed in the US. Their success has electrified the British right, and filled it with covetous envy. 

If Trump can break every taboo over there, why can’t we break them over here?

One of the best things about being English in the late 20th century was that we enforced a taboo against racial purity tests.  Mudbloods were confined to Harry Potter stories. 

How much longer the old constraints will hold  is now an open question.

 In an interview earlier this year with Fraser Nelson, my old editor at the Spectator, Konstantin Kisin, an online political entrepreneur, opined that Englishness was a racial and religious trait. Despite being the most English Englishman you could hope to meet, Rishi Sunak wasn’t really English, he insisted.

“He’s a brown Hindu,” Kisin said. “How is he English?” 

Nelson was shocked by the new fashion to belittle and delegitimize members of England’s ethnic minorities.

To see such subjects “casually discussed in a way unthinkable even a year ago is to understand how the pendulum may well be swinging from one deranged fringe to another,” he wrote.  The new ideology held that “the whites are the victims, with their country, identity and culture under siege from criminal immigrant hordes.”  Would anyone, Nelson wondered,  looking to make a career on the right now be tempted to” take the knee before the MAGA gods?”

He didn’t have to wait long for an answer. A few days ago, Michael Gove, Nelson’s successor at the Spectator, duly took the knee. He was interviewing Matthew Goodwin, an academic turned right-wing influencer, who again insisted that Englishness was an ethnicity only available to men and women who could “trace their roots back through many generations” . 

Gove raised the Sunak example but then stopped arguing. He nodded along with ideas of ethnic purity and, unlike Nelson, did not worry about the dangers behind the new racialised slogans.

The contrast between Nelson and Gove tells all you eed to know about conservatism’s direction.

According to the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws a person with three or more Jewish grandparents was Jewish, not German, while a person with two Jewish grandparents was either  a Jew or a Mischling (mixed blood) of the first degree,, while a person with only one Jewish grandparent was Mischling of the second degree.

According to the English right’s new dispensation it is not just Sunak. No one with black, Asian, Irish, European,or Jewish ancestry  can ever be English.  One of my grandparents was a Lithuanian Jew,  so I guess  I am a  mudblood Mischling of the second degree.

The only reasonable reaction to lectures on race theory from cranks on the make like Kisin and Goodwin is to use the English language plainly and tell them to fuck off. Who the hell are they to lay down purity laws?

But Gove was a minister during the last Tory government. He is hideously compromised by the failures of austerity, Brexit and Truss, and by the broken promises on tax and immigration. He is in no position to defend supposedly moderate conservatism against an attack from extremes – even if he wanted to fight back.

 So Gove smiles and coos  and goes along with the cranks, and tells the rest of us all we need to know about the future of conservatism. It is a frightending prospect.