Liberal Britain has not been in such danger in 50 years

The resistible rise of the Trumpite right

“Free-speech martyrs” torch a police van in the Southport riots (Wiki creative commons)

The UK feels as if it is at its most dangerous moment since neo-fascists marched in the 1970s. Our time may well be more dangerous, in fact, because the coalition of forces ranged against liberal democracy is more formidable now.

One day, maybe soon, the police lines outside a hotel for asylum seekers will break – as they nearly did in the riots after the Southport murders last year. Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, and the claque of right-wing influencers will play the part of Pontius Pilate and deny responsibility for the violence.

“How dare you hold us to account?”

They will keep their heads down for a few days. Then they will denounce a “two-tier justice” system, to use Badenoch’s words, that gives disproportionate punishment to whites and recast criminals as “martyrs” to a woke tyranny.

Never in recent British history has there been such strong right-wing support for extremism. You must go back to the 1910s, when the Tories encouraged troops to mutiny against the Liberal government’s policy of allowing home rule for Ireland, to find such tolerance for lawlessness.

Here’s how politics works in our frightened time. Trump’s UK ally Nigel Farage proposed yesterday to deport 600,000 people.

The obvious question arose: how will he persuade other countries to accept them?

In the case of Afghan refugees fleeing an Islamist dictatorship, Farage said that a Reform government would pay the Taliban to take them back.

Farage, who is happy to denounce British Muslims for not sharing our values, is proposing to use taxpayers’ money to fund a state terrorist movement that murders dissidents and within recent memory was killing British troops.

And… nothing happened.

Keir Starmer’s Labour government did not take Farage on. It is now so browbeaten it meekly said instead that it “was open to striking deals with the Taliban” too.

Nor did Farage’s plan to fund what conservatives used to call “Islamo-fascism” provoke hard questions from the BBC or denunciations in the Tory press. Indeed, I think it is time to retire that label. With honourable exceptions I will come to in a minute, the Tory press has moved ever-further rightwards and is now to all intents and purposes the Farage press.

In the process, it has become everything it once accused left-wing writers of being: shrill, dogmatic, predictable, and grindingly joyless – much like the Britain it hopes to create.

As for the BBC, as I explained in a long analysis from a few months ago, it is terrified that one day the radical right will abolish it. And so the BBC doffs the cap and tugs the forelock and leaves hard questions to the few journalists left who are willing to ask them.

Our times are so frightening because Farage’s Reform is not some fringe neo-Nazi movement, like the National Front of the 1970s. It is leading the polls, and as things stand, could form the next government.

In another departure, which receives nowhere near the attention it deserves, Farage and men further to his right have the backing of the United States, still the most powerful country on earth. On his trip to the UK earlier this month, J .D. Vance showed his support when he met Farage, Robert Jenrick who seeks to outflank Farage on the right, and Cambridge academic, James Orr who in true Trumpian fashion, denigrates Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism.

If MAGA still controls America in 2029, the British radical right will have the support of the US government in the next election campaign – and, by extension, the support of Russia and its propagandists.

Have I depressed you enough?

There’s more.

What was once the UK’s “moderate” centre-right party now imitates Farage like an incel posing as Andrew Tate.

Ominously, the Tories no longer believe in the rule of law, as they proved when Badenoch denounced the criminal justice system for holding rabble rousers to account.

I am sure historians will see the riots that followed Axel Rudakubana’s murders of little girls in Southport as the start of a wave of reaction. Famously now, the courts jailed Lucy Connolly for publishing to hundreds of thousands of Twitter (X) users:

“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it”

(I quote her tweet in full because hardly anyone ever does)

As I have said before, suppose a radical Islamist from Bradford tweeted

“Pogrom now. Set fire to all the fucking synagogues full of the Jew bastards for all I care...If that makes me an antisemite, so be it.”

Badenoch, Farage, the Telegraph, Vance and Trump would not claim that the Islamist was a “political prisoner” – as they claimed Lucy Connelly was a political prisoner – nor would the MAGA movement in the US Congress invite Farage to discuss the Islamist’s case.

We are in a world where people who once defended the police and the judiciary now believe white rioters should go unpunished.

The parallels with Trump pardoning the insurrectionists who stormed Congress to overthrow a free election are obvious – but are no less frightening for that.

You don’t have to take it from me. In a sea of conformist hacks, there are a handful of conservative writers left who retain the journalistic independence to speak out.

Charles Moore, a former editor of the Telegraph, wrote a perceptive piece warning that “perverted patriotism may yet lead to neo-fascism”. He was angered by the recent advocacy of James Orr, Vance and Farage’s house intellectual, for the slogan “Faith, Flag and Family.”

Orr “must know how similar these words are to the propaganda of Vichy France “Famille. Travail. Patrie”,” Moore said.

“One well-known Vichy poster contrasted an attractive, well-built house founded on these principles with a crumbling one built on “capital”, “Jewishness”, “democracies” and other supposed evils. Does that not worry him?”

I wonder if it does. For if you want an example of modern Vichyism you need only look at how Vance and Trump follow Vladimir Putin’s propaganda lines.

Meanwhile Fraser Nelson, a former editor of the Spectator, has been taking apart Farage’s straight lie that we are in the midst of a migrant-driven crime wave. No good is it doing him. For as Brexit showed, there is no penalty for lying to the public.

Farage now knows what Trump and Orban and so many other of the squalid loudmouths who dominate our age know. There are plenty of voters who want to be lied to, and need to be lied to, and when given the chance will put the men who lied to them in power so they can lie to them some more.

If the UK makes it through to the 2030s with our democracy intact, we should count ourselves lucky.

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