The Conservative party is a far-right party and only Britain's smug and insular ignorance stops us saying so plainly

Of course it can bloody happen here!

Nigel Farage receives the attention he feels he deserves at the Conservative party conference (CREDIT PA)

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The UK's right-wing myths do not offer a stirring patriotic vision. They consist of small-minded, smug and, to be frank, stupid evasions of the truth about the conservative movement.

Because Conservatives do not want to understand the outside world they cannot understand themselves. Any outsider who knows European politics can look at the Conservative party and see it for the far-right party it has become. But Conservatives cannot and will not see themselves clearly because self-knowledge would rip their comfort blanket to shreds.

I don’t mean the Conservatives have become a fascist party.  I am not asking readers to imitate student leftists who shout “fascist” at everything they don’t like. Rather it is a modern European far-right party that shares the distinctive features of opposition to the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights, environmental controls, and migration, and the equally characteristic embrace of know-nothing conspiracism, authoritarianism and outright lying.

Let me count the points of similarity.

On the EU, the British Conservatives are further to the right than any other European far-right party. No one, not Marine le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Giorgia Meloni in Italy has followed the lead of the Conservative party and Ukip and supported plans to take their countries out of the EU. They saw the damage Brexit has done (and continues to do) to the UK and backed away from such a dangerously extremist version of self-harming nationalism.

Any honest conservative should admit that, when Viktor Orban can gaze at you from the centre ground, you are in a great deal of trouble. But honest Conservatives are in short supply.

I accept that one can hardly call the party “racist” when the Liz Truss administration was the most diverse government in British history, and Rishi Sunak is our first PM of Indian heritage, although unfortunately that is Sunak’s only distinguishing characteristic.

However, I cannot find any other European country, which has treated migrants possessing full rights of residence with the cruelty and contempt the Conservatives displayed in the Windrush scandal.  It detained, deported and denied legal rights to elderly Caribbean migrants without even caring enough to notice the outrages its officials were committing.

And to bring us up to date, if Suella Braverman were interior minister in any other European country and was trying to dump migrants, including genuine refugees fleeing political persecution, in Rwanda  no one would have the smallest hesitation in describing her as “far right”. Here, we are not meant to call her far right or hard right or radical right or populist right. We are told not to use any label that accurately describes what we can see in front of our eyes because she’s British and the British myth is that extremism is something those excitable continentals do. Like fascism and communism in the 20th century, it can’t happen here.

Writing in Times the Conservative commentator Iain Martin wondered if he could say anything good about the 13-years (and counting) of Conservative rule. Not much, he candidly admitted. But, he cried with a spirited rally,  the party can at least be praised for “containing the fallout from the populist explosion”.

What?

Meanwhile, writing in the Financial Times Janan Ganesh claimed that the Conservative party had made Britain a “haven from the hard right”. Going through his piece I wondered if the FT had fired its fact checkers. Ganash’s evidence for the assertion that the Conservative government could not possibly be seen as a part of the European far right was that it “supported, in word and in deed, Ukraine against Russia” and “imposed lockdowns of world-leading severity during the Covid-19 pandemic”.

Seriously?

Poland’s populist Law and Justice regime and Italy’s post-fascist government both support Ukraine in “word and deed,” and no one doubts that they are far-right administrations. As for tough Covid restrictions Poland and Hungary had them too as their dictatorial leaders saw them as useful ways of restricting civil liberties. Is Viktor Orban now a moderate conservative now? Is Law and Justice not an extreme conspiracist movement?

The desire to believe that the British and more specifically the English, are a commonsensical people of moderate temperament runs deep in our small “c” conservative culture.  The last ten years have revealed how dangerous that notion is. It breeds complacency. Extremism of the right and left should be fought.  Fighting and winning is the only way to ensure that "it can't happen here".   But instead of fighting or allowing others to fight, Conservatives deny the need to fight by pretending  that the radical right does not exist. 

I can see how they end up in denial. I am sure that columnists on the Times and Financial Times know  many Conservative politicians who are perfectly reasonable people.  I certainly do. You would never guess  it from the behaviour of Rishi Sunak, but 150 Tory MPs and peers support the Conservative environmental network today, just as a majority of Conservative MPs supported keeping Britian in the EU in 2016.

But Sunak can trash carbon reduction goals and no one in the Conservative party can hope to prosper if they  support rejoining the EU because the power in the party, the dark energy that propels it, comes from the right.  The radicalization Brexit began sent the Conservative party lunging towards the extremes. It does not matter how many Conservative MPs or journalists say they are moderate men and women. The pattern since 2016 has been of continuous rightward movement.

This is why,  in the words of Professor Tim Bale, the UK’s foremost academic authority on the Conservatives, the party is now in danger of  leaving “the mainstream centre-right and sailing off into the shark-infested, migrant-bashing, war-on-woke, multiculturalism-has-failed, conspiracy-fuelled waters of national populism.”

In danger? I would say that the horse bolted through the stable doors  long ago.

Extremism may not have seduced everyone but it has seduced the people who matter. In the Tory press, among the hobbyist plutocrats who finance the party, in the Conservatives’ elderly and embittered membership, and in the new propaganda TV stations, the logic of the Brexit victory, the confidence it gave, and the denial it necessitates, pushes conservatism on towards a grim terminus. With mounting frequency since 2016 the party has defined itself in classic populist terms as the defenders of "the people” against the progressive elite. Once again, the similarities with continental far right are more striking that the differences.

Just as the Corbyn movement and the far left drew vast strength from social media in the 2010s so the radical right is now filled American-style right-wing entrepreneurs, infotainment politicians who strike poses  for GB and Twitter as they seek the fame that gives them clout on the right, and indeed, for never forget its importance, the money too.

If you doubt me, ask yourself why on earth was Nigel Farage walking around this week’s Conservative party conference as if he owned the place? Why was Rishi Sunak saying that Farage could be welcomed into the party, and why were delegates making it clear that they wanted Farage as their leader?  Or must we preserve the purity of the British conservative myth by pretending that Farage is not a far-right or radical-right politician either, and he too has worked to keep the UK as a “haven” from extremism.

David Cameron called the Brexit referendum of 2016, and Boris Johnson and David Frost imposed an appalling Brexit deal on us to defuse the threat from the right. We can see now that appeasing the monster has not satisfied it and its appetite has only increased with the feeding. 

We can watch respectable politicians sense where the power  lies and bend the knee. Mark Harper, a graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford, and a former pupil of Vernon Bogdanor,  a guardian of Britain’s constitutional principles, turned into a Twitter crazy at the party conference  from GB News as he babbled about dark plots to impose 15-minute cities and claimed  “that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops”.

@vicderbyshireScience Secretary Michelle Donelan came on BBC #Newsnight last night - full interview on BBC iplayer

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Michelle Donelan, once a genuinely liberal Conservative, concerned about fighting domestic violence and reforming the family courts, now defends bare-faced Trumpian lies without a flicker of embarrassment

Let me be blunt. There is a reason why Conservatives do not want to use the English language accurately.  If you call the far right by its real name, it raises the question "are you prepared to fight the extremists on your own side? And as we can see all around us they are either too frightened to fight, or to willing to go to the extremes themselves.

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