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.