The UK's Conservatives have become a radical right party and aren't about to change

Interview with Professor Tim Bale on the Tory doom loop

Greetings,

You can listen to the Lowdown on the Apple player (see below).  We are also on Spotify, Android, Amazon, and via this link, on every podcast player humankind has invented.

I hope you enjoy it, Nick

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This week I was delighted to interview Professor Tim Bale, the UK’s leading authority on the British right and the author of The Conservative Party After Brexit. I wanted to talk to him about the future direction of the party. Tim was clear that, like a car whose steering wheel has locked, it could only head one way.

“The Conservative Party has moved so far towards the agenda of UKIP and the Brexit party that it's slipped its moorings to the mainstream centre-right and in effect become a populist radical right party. And It's going to be very, very difficult for the Conservatives to put that genie back into the bottle, even if they want to.”

In the long run, Bale believes, its agenda will fail

“Why? Because the UK is becoming ever more multicultural and is becoming ever more socially liberal, whether politicians like it or not. A lot of the people who voted for Brexit, and let's not put too fine a point on it, have shuffled off this mortal coil and a lot more will shuffle off this mortal coil in the next 10/15 years.”

Please listen to the whole thing.

Below is a long read from me I put up in May on how in its conspiracy theories and dogmatism the radical right of the 21^st century is imitating the communist movement of the 20^th. You can sign up as a paid subscriber for £1.15 a week, and there’s a free trial for commitment-phobes!

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The Brexit Revolution stabs itself in the back

Waiting for a betrayal: Claire Fox and Nigel Farage (SKY)

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Communists helped the British radical right achieve their counter-revolution. Not ex-communists who found their revolutionary God had failed, and with a sigh began what Julian Barnes called the “traditional shuffle to the right”.  Not men and women, who despite themselves, saw the truth in the saying attributed to Winston Churchill (falsely as it turns out) that “if a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.”

I mean actual communists, or people who said they were. Marxists who used arguments from the far left to inspire the Brexit right.