Will the radical right take over the Tories?
Lowdown interview with Prof Rob Ford on the fate of conservatism and the slobbery of Matt Goodwin
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With the radical right Reform party planning to run candidates in all seats at the next UK election, and Trump’s best British friend, Nigel Farage, hinting he may return to politics to help it, everyone agrees that the Conservatives may face an electoral wipeout. The nerds among you will know about how the first-past-the-post system went haywire in the 1993 Canadian election when the ruling conservative party was reduced to just two seats. A radical-right rival split the vote, and a collapse followed. The same just might happen in the UK in 2024.
But hold on a minute. The conventional narrative for the next election already feels false, and the campaign has not even started yet.
How can there be a threat to the Conservatives from the radical right when the Conservatives have given a decent impression of being a radical right party for close to a decade now?
Let me count the ways
They have taken their country out of the European Union, a policy so extreme not even Marine le Pen or Viktor Orban will imitate it.
They won the 2019 general election by taking the vote of the Brexit party, Farage’s previous vehicle, with the promise of a hard Brexit.
They slashed the public sector. They let Liz Truss turn the country into a laboratory for Reaganite economics.
How can anyone say the trouble with the Conservatives is that they have not been right-wing enough?
And yet the radical right is saying that. Partly it is the failure of Brexit to end mass immigration. More than that, I believe, we are witnessing among politicians right-wing journalists and intellectuals a frankly cowardly and dishonest move to distance themselves from the reality of Conservatism in power.
To analyse where the UK and Western right is heading, I was joined on the Lowdown by Rob Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University. There is no person better qualified for the task. With his co-author Matt Goodwin (of whom more later) he wrote Revolt on the Right the first book to take the new radical right seriously.
He began our conversation by making an important distinction, which settled a question that had been bothering me. Conservatives make a good point when they say that leftists call everything they don’t like fascist/far right/racist. And yet we have movements far to the right of conservatives of the late 20th century, and they need naming.
Usefully Ford calls politicians and movements that, whatever their policies, respect democratic norms radical right, but those that threaten democracy far right. On this reading Donald Trump began as a radical right politician and became a far-right leader when he tried to overturn the 2020 US presidential election result.
We talk about
How and why, if Farage comes back, Reform could do serious damage to the already battered Conservative party.
How radical-right ideas are now mainstream Conservative policies – nationalism, anti-Europeanism, a belief in a pure people and a hatred of all elites other than right-wing elites.
How the best means for Farage to win influence over the Conservative party in 2025 is to show how badly he can hurt it in 2024.
We finished by looking at Rob’s former collaborator, Matt Goodwin, who stared into the abyss of radical right politics for too long and found the abyss staring back into him. The academic who studied Farage is now a radical right hustler and agitator who wishes to emulate Farage . Goodwin is building up his monetary base on Substack and his media profile as a national conservative talking head on the BBC.
Earlier this year when Goodwin wrote a book on how “Britain is in the grip of a new elite” I gave him a proper polemical going over on this site. You can read it below (there’s a free trial for non-subscribers).
Slobbery and Sycophancy: the case of Matt Goodwin
Professor Matthew Goodwin selling his wares
I first came across the professor of politics at Kent University in 2018, when Matt Goodwin compiled a list of journalists guilty of disparaging the millions who voted to leave the EU in 2016. I had, apparently, greeted their democratic choice by saying that it was as if the “sewers have burst”.
Odd, I thought, I don’t remember denigrating Brexit voters in those terms. I Googled myself and discovered the sly professor had pulled a move ideally suited to the propaganda needs of a conservative elite that poses as the people’s dearest friend.
In June 2016, I described how Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings had begun their Brexit campaign with a solemn promise that they would never play the race card. We do “not need to focus on immigration,” Cummings said. The essential task for his respectable leave campaign was not to incite fears of foreigners, but “to neutralise the fear that leaving may be bad for jobs and living standards.”
His high-mindedness didn’t last. As referendum day approached, Gove, Johnson and Cummings decided to pull whatever trick they could to get over the line. The race card was a winning card, they decided. They switched to issuing the fake news that 76 million (mainly Muslim) Turks could head our way if we didn’t leave.
Looking at their breach of promise and incitement of fear, I said “it is as if the sewers have burst.”
I told Goodwin on Twitter that he was confusing my criticism of the powerful with criticism of the powerless. He ignored me. I realised then that the professor did not abide by the normal academic standards of accuracy but was, when it came down to it, a bit of a slob. And not just any old slob but a sycophantic slob, who slobbered all over the powerful.
Any student of politics, let alone an actual professor of politics, ought to be able to see through the trick he pulls.
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