A paradox sits at the heart of
British politics. We have the most racially diverse Cabinet in history. With Vaughan Gething’s
election as Welsh
Labour leader , no
UK nation will be led by a white man. And yet last week we saw senior Conservatives trying to tell us that when a party donor reportedly said that one black woman made him dislike all black
Women, it wasn’t racist. As
Britain has become more racially heterogenous, and actually more at ease with itself, the top of politics appears to have started to entertain ideas which a decade or more ago would have been instantly ostracised. How to account for it? It isn’t the sole factor, but a major force has been the nervous breakdown on the right of politics, its slow radicalisation over the past decade and pull away from a politics anchored in liberalism. Both the Labour and Conservative parties in recent years have been engulfed by their own tawdry
racism crises. Though Labour’s episode was shameful, they at least eventually recognised the problem , and have sought to remedy, sometimes to the point of excessiveness. Not allowing Diane Abbott back into the party after a full apology for her own remarks about a hierarchy of racism is hard-edged, especially given that many suspect factional motivations from Keir Starmer’s office in so doing. But right now, like the proverbial drunk at the bar, the Conservatives don’t even recognise they have a problem. Indeed they’ve become convinced that their own voters and members will punish them for even recognising racism, hence their hesitation in instantly condemning Frank Hester. They remind me of Labour at its worst in the antisemitism crisis, even refusing to use the term Islamophobia as Labour once argued about the EHRC definition of antisemitism, both insisting that allowing the minority group in question were not allowed to define the terms of the own racism they experience. Signs of the Tories’ tin-eared approach to integration abound. Before the Hester row had exploded, newly minted Reform MP Lee Anderson said he “wanted my country back” . This one phrase says much about the disposition of the new British radical right. There is the entitlement, for sure. Who says it was his country, anyway? Or at least that it’s more his country, than anybody else’s? Like Sadiq Khan’s ? The
London luvvies he says he so abhors? And that’s before we even get on to the next question – back from whom? Who or what has taken it away? It’s a line with pedigree in British politics. It was deployed most recently by
Nigel Farage and other Brexiters in the run up to the EU
referendum. It adverts to the fact that the trajectory of modern conservatism is a politics of constant offence. Someone or something has always taken what you had away, they say to voters – they’ve betrayed you. There is always a new enemy to smite, a new opponent lurking under the bed. But it’s been used in other contexts as well. I was in
Washington just after
Barack Obama became president and saw the genesis of the Tea Party movement. The slogan that they wanted their country back became commonplace and it wasn’t hard to draw the dots between slogan and nativist invective – that the person from whom they wanted it back was Obama and on some level, returned to white people. Many ethnic minorities hearing those words here, especially given Anderson’s tirade against
Sadiq Khan, might be forgiven for drawing the same conclusion, whether it’s what Anderson means or not. The pedigree of this sort of politics overall is longer still. The darkest day in race relations in British postwar history is of course Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech . When people remember that fateful speech in Birmingham in 1968, it was primarily for Powell’s revolting language. But it was his argument, not the florid language, which has not only endured, but become acceptable. Powell argued that the British national character could not survive with the rates of
immigration as they then were. He argued that immigrants were granted superior rights to those of the indigenous population, that they sought to take control, that they were forming an enemy within. He argued that Britain faced an existential problem for its survival as a result. Read Next Tory fretting over Lee Anderson puts them on a dangerous path Sound familiar? The hallmarks of Powellism are to be found on the underbelly of much of our own politics and in particular in current Conservative thinking, albeit in a different context. The endless talk of Islamism, of state capture, of Britain’s national life being altered, with the connivance of the state are the instinctive reflexes of some ministers, senior backbenchers and newspaper proprietors. They amplify a threat which either does not exist or is minimal, for their own political ends. Powell and Powellism were isolated views in his heyday, today his ideological successors are powerful and gaining ground in the battle of ideas. If Powell were alive today, he would not be shunned and ostracised, he’d probably be a keynote speaker at the rapidly germinating sub-groups of Conservative thinking, NatCon, PopCon or Reform. That’s despite the fact that Powell was proven wrong. Waves of immigration from around the world has in no way diminished or fundamentally altered British national characteristics. Second-, third-, fourth-generation immigrants are as well integrated as anybody else, and exhibit the traits we think of as British, most of all a deeply entrenched liberalism from which some in the Tory party now retreat. But right now, Conservative ministers and backbenchers talk as if it’s hanging by a thread, as if a group of
protesters (however unpleasant some of their views) or certain Muslims in the population, are an existential threat to British national life. There are plenty of Conservatives who disagree with this reductionism. It’s their
Job to fight it for it and a sensible debate about the benefits and costs of immigration – they both of them exist. If not, the paradox I mentioned some paragraphs back, will only become more acute, to their party’s cost and to ours. Lewis Goodall is a journalist, broadcaster and one of the hosts of the podcast The News Agents by Global