The pretence that the far right does not exist is destroying conservatism

The Tories cannot escape its deadly embrace

Geert Wilders: Not an extremist apparently​ (REUTERS)

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The far right has become the political equivalent of alcoholism. As far as addicts hooked on populism are concerned, it does not exist.

Allow me to explain. When I kicked my alcohol addiction and researched the drug that had a such a hold on me, I found a widespread denial among my contemporaries that my addiction was an addiction at all. Because alcohol is a legal hard drug, and a drug that 82 per cent of the adult population still takes, our culture protects itself by making the alcoholic an extreme and marginal figure: some poor guy collapsed on a park bench, not the businessman drinking five pints in a session or the businesswoman downing a bottle of wine a night.

By any reasonable standards if you drink every day and binge drink until you collapse you are a drug addict. Our cultural self-defence mechanisms ensure, however, that you can still think of yourself as a normal person who just enjoys a “good night out.”

As with alcoholism, so with conservatism.  Try to use the term “far right” or “extreme right” or even “populist right” to describe extremist movements and conservative commentators shout you down. Just as a drinking culture protects itself by saying that an alcoholic can only be the extreme case of a wrecked man in a park, so conservatives protect themselves by saying that an extreme right-winger can only be a Nazi.

Every man should have a hobby and mine is keeping a record of extremist self-delusion. Recent entries include a piece this week by Alison Pearson, a  Telegraph columnist, who said that the UK needed its own Geert Wilders. A far-right sentiment? Surely, we can say that.

We can do nothing of the sort, according to Pearson. “Across Europe, millions of reasonable people who are not far-Right are sick of their governments failing to stop high levels of immigration which put a strain on crumbling public services, make housing unaffordable, increase community tensions and jeopardise national security…Ignored by politicians and enraged that anyone who doesn’t go along with this enforced ‘diversity’ is accused of racism, voters are increasingly drawn to nationalists who feel their pain.” 

Over at the Times, you can read a near identical column by Melanie Phillips this morning. After citing Wilders' strong showing in the Dutch election, and explaining away the race riots in Dublin with the forgiving line that “public rage over immigration had boiled over,” she concluded that, “For years, proper discussion of all this has been paralysed. There has been an unholy alliance between progressives, who hold that the defence of national identity is racist, and free-market conservatives who support mass immigration to force down wage costs. Yet across Europe, the public is showing that what has been denounced as ‘far right’ turns out to be the mainstream — which has been abandoned by the entire political establishment.”

If you vote for Wilders, you are on the far right of politics and are endorsing racism. It’s an abuse of language to pretend otherwise. Everyone, or I guess nearly everyone, who voted for him knew that Wilders wants to ban mosques and Islamic schools Supporting him makes you an anti-Muslim bigot. What else can you possibly be?

We are not meant to say that Suella Braverman, the British Wilders, is a far right figure. Instead, the Telegraph once again says that she speaks for the “silent majority of the public”. There is a propaganda network for Viktor Orban that insists he is not the quasi-dictator he gives every appearance of being, but a defender of “national sovereignty”, the AFD is not a far-right, apparently, and Boris Johnson’s press people deny that he was a populist.

 I could go on, but I am sure that you get the point. It is not that there aren’t legitimate debates about what constitutes a far-right position. In the US it is standard for Republicans to oppose abortion, gun control and universal health care: a package few Europeans, however extreme their views would endorse. You cannot survive in UK Conservative circles and oppose Brexit. European far right parties have looked at Brexit’s disastrous consequences and backed away.

The argument in the conservative media, however, is not about what constitutes far-right politics but a denial that the far right exists at all.

Let us take a step back and survey the landscape. Conservative writers complain with justice about leftists who denounce anyone they oppose as a “racist,” “fascist” or “bigot”. They  warn quite rightly of the dangers of crying wolf and devaluing the linguistic currency. But by insisting that the far right is not the far right they don’t so much devalue the currency as deal in counterfeit coin.

Conservative propagandists want it both ways. They want to reassure readers that conservatives are the same solid and sensible people their parents and grandparents voted for.  At the same time, they want to advance their radical agenda, and claim that anti-immigrant far-right parties and policies are a challenge to the elite and the “establishment”. Quite clearly, both these positions cannot be true at the same time. Either conservatism is the same as it’s always been or it is transforming itself into a populist movement. It cannot be both and it is a cheap propaganda trick to pretend otherwise.  Conservative writers are attempting to mould the language to prevent us describing what we see with  our own eyes.

It turns out Nazism has performed an invaluable service. By setting the bar for extremism so high, it allowed nearly every variety of nativist and know-nothing to pass under it.  Right-wingers can maintain that, as long as they are not holding night-time rallies in Nuremberg or building death camps in Poland, no one can call them extremists.

I could go on about the hypocrisy of it all. Maybe I will one day because it is such a juicy target. But the important consideration for the future of conservatism in the UK is that sleights of hand that work well on the comment pages are a disaster politically. You can see how disastrous by looking at the wreck that was once the British Conservative party.