The radical right devours moderate conservatism
The UK turns American
The death of moderate conservatism is one of the great and gruesome stories of the 21st century.
If traditional conservatives had held firm, Donald Trump would not now be president of the United States presiding over unprecedented levels of corruption and gerrymandering at home, and the destruction of the Western alliance. Ukraine would be defended. Viktor Orbán would never have been able to rob Hungarians blind, and Marine Le Pen or her nominee would not be the likely next president of France.
Almost unnoticed in the coverage of the Makerfield by-election is the willingness of Conservatives to embrace Nigel Farage rather than allow a moderate leftist to become prime minister.
I should explain to non-British readers that this fight for a “left-behind” post-industrial constituency has assumed astonishing significance.
It is not now just one of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, but a crucial battleground. Keir Starmer, our centre-left Labour prime minister, is hugely unpopular. As things stand, the Labour Party is heading for a wipeout at the next general election, and Nigel Farage, Trump’s mini-me, could take power
To stop Farage, Andy Burnham the charismatic Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester has engineered a by-election in Makerfield. If he wins, he will return and in short order become leader of the Labour party and prime minister. If he loses, the radical right will be in the ascendant.
There is a significant faction among people we used to call “Conservatives” that would rather see Farage triumph than a politician from the centre-left succeed.
Let us be clear what a vote for Farage means.
Like Trump and Orbán, Farage is open to receiving more money than most people dream off from excessively wealthy men. Only a few days ago, the Guardian revealed that Farage was given a personal gift of £5m by the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.
Farage says he cannot be bought and Harborne says he wants nothing in return. Very noble of them, I am sure.
Nevertheless, just as his ally Trump has banked payments from the crypto industry and eased off on regulation, so Farage has proposed a new “Big Bang” that could add tens of billions to crypto companies’ market value.
Meanwhile, Farage wants to deport 600,000 people including countless thousands of migrants who have already won the legal right to stay in this country. Policies that were once the preserve of neo-Nazi groups like the National Front and British National Party are now mainstream. In a typically jeering performance, the party promised to open detention camps in areas that vote for the radical left Green Party if and when it came to power.
Among the principles right-wingers used to hold were an abhorrence of retrospective legislation and respect for the rule of law. But that’s all old hat these days.
Finally, there’s the admiration for Putin and Trump, the climate=change denial, the flirting with anti-vaxxers, and the endless bitching about Ukraine.
I don’t want to get lost in arguments about the difference between the far right and the radical right.
I will just note that for people who go on about the need to control migration the Western right lives in a borderless land. There are no fences or customs posts anymore, and no lines you cannot cross. People who consider themselves respectable are going over to the extremes without anyone even protesting.
It’s not just that Tory MPs, led by Robert Jenrick, have defected to Reform — and in doing so have obliterated the distinction between the centre-right and the radical right. Leading politicians who have stayed in what’s left of the old Conservative Party want to help Farage, too.
The Telegraph reported that Sir Edward Leigh, a veteran Tory MP, has called on the party to stand down in Makerfield in return for Reform standing down in Aberdeen South when a by-election is held in the Scottish seat. “My view is that if at the next general election … there are two right-wing parties slugging it out in every single constituency, as night follows day there will be a left-wing government,” Leigh said.
Jacob Rees-Mogg also wants the Conservatives and Reform UK to “work together” to defeat Andy Burnham in order to give the Labour Party a “nasty surprise”.
Kemi Badenoch has ruled out a pact with Reform, but it is quite clear that a sizeable minority within her party is desperate for one. Indeed, in much of the right-wing world beyond Westminster, the two parties have already merged.
I have written before about how it no longer makes sense to talk of the “Tory press”. The Times is the only Conservative paper left. The Mail, Sun, Express, and Telegraph are as likely to cheer on Farage as the Tories.
Meanwhile the right-wing TV station GB News, ignores the UK’s broadcasting impartiality laws, and has become such a Faragist outfit it gives our Trump wannabe a show of his own.
If you want to understand the world we are in, the best books to read are the memoirs of old-fashioned conservatives, who thought their friends and allies were good people who believed in free markets and free societies, and then watched open-mouthed as they switched to corruption and autocracy.
I wrote a long essay based on Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends Anne Appelbaum’s account from 2020 of why people she once knew and liked embraced Trump, Orban and Brexit.
We need far more work like it. We should be treating the trampling down of boundaries on the right as a huge and hugely disturbing story.
Don’t think it can’t happen here.
It’s already happening here.
Anne Applebaum and the right’s authoritarian turn
Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match.
When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings.
Her friends did it, she replies.
Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once known her, the feeling is reciprocated.
