The radical right gets a free pass

The Lowdon podcast on the Tory appeasement of Farage

The most important political challenge of our time is the fight against the radical right. If you want to start shouting at me about the dangers of the far left or the woke left, that is fine. I have done my best to fight them and earned my scars.

As every fair observer must accept, however, nowhere in the West and indeed in the rest of the world is the far left close to taking power.

By contrast, one need only look around at the US, India, most of Europe, and here in the UK, to see the strength of the radical right.  

At this year’s general election, an appalling year for the right-wing politicians, the combined Conservative/Reform vote was nevertheless a little shy of 11 million. More than enough to win if it could be united.

You need exceptionally good eyesight to distinguish between the two parties. Anyone who still thinks of the Conservatives as a moderate outfit should notice that Nigel Farage supports Donald Trump, and so too do Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Robert Jenrick.

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage believes in Brexit, and so in turn do the Conservatives, even though the rest of the European right has given up on leaving after seeing what a mess Euroscepticism made of the UK.

Above all else, as Nick Tyrone and I discuss on the Lowdown this week, the most remarkable crossover lies in the absolute inability of Conservatives to take on Farage. He wants to destroy them and they want to appease him.

Mind you, one could say the same about a Labour party that offers no consistent attack on the radical right either.

All the more reason for the rest of us to do it, say I.

You can listen here on Apple

And here on Spotify

On Amazon and on every other podcast host.

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Below is a longish read from me of the Conservatives’ failure to deal with Farage written during the election campaign. There’s a free trial to get over the paywall, or if you wish to support my journalism you can earn my undying gratitude by signing up as a paying subscriber.

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The radical right destroys the Conservatives

The price of appeasement

Conventional Conservative wisdom once warned about the dangers of appeasement. Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of imperialism, may be the most cancelled figure in British literature, but I imagine even leftists can see how his lines in Danegeld apply to the Tory party’s appeasement of Nigel Farage:

‘And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

But we’ve proved it again and again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

You never get rid of the Dane.‘

I guess, too, that before the rise of Ukip, all Conservative politicians knew Winston Churchill’s line that ‘an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last’.