Tim Bale's Blog

In the past few days, the United Kingdom has witnessed a wave of violent disorder. Many of those involved are doubtless motivated not so much by politics as by the kind of excitement that football hooligans the world over have long derived from attacking the authorities. But there is no doubt that the attacks have been instigated and orchestrated by right-wing extremists tapping into what are, sadly, often widespread prejudices – particularly when it comes to people of color, Muslims, and asylum seekers.

Of course, riots ostensibly driven by religious and racial hatred and opposition to immigration are nothing new in the UK. Indeed, one can go back as far as 1780 to see London suffering a week of violent anti-Roman Catholic disorder, while in the late 1950s various towns and cities were afflicted by “race riots” on the part of white men objecting to the arrival of Black and south Asian immigrants from the British Commonwealth.

More recently, 2001 saw riots in cities and towns in northern England, most notably in Oldham, Greater Manchester, which saw clashes between far-right activists and people from the town’s south Asian (predominantly Pakistani-origin) community.

Nor are violent protests outside hotels being used to house asylum seekers or attacks on mosques anything new. Last February, for example, a police vehicle was set ablaze and missiles were thrown at officers outside a hotel in Knowsley, Merseyside. True, the country’s mosques have rarely seen anything on that scale. But there are plenty of examples of isolated attacks on their property and on their worshipers – most horrifically in 2017, when a far-right extremist drove a van into a crowd outside the Muslim Welfare House and near a mosque in Finsbury Park, London.

What is new, however, is the sheer spread and extent of the disorder that the UK is experiencing right now, prompting people both at home and abroad, particularly, perhaps, in Muslim communities and countries, to ask why us – and why now?

The answer lies, at least in part, in an underlying current of Islamophobia – not that the UK is by any means unique in that respect. Indeed, in many ways, the British are significantly less likely to hold that particular prejudice (and other, often related, prejudices) than the populations of other European countries.

The European Values Survey for example regularly asks people about people they would not like to have as neighbors. In the 2017-18 survey, some 5% of Brits ticked “Muslims,” while 2% ticked “People of a different race,” and 6% ticked “Immigrants.” Compare those figures with Germany (16% 5% and 7% respectively) and Italy (20%, 12%, and 18%), and the UK doesn’t – relatively speaking anyway – come off too badly.

Dig a little deeper, however, and the picture is more worrying. Research released earlier this year [1] suggests that a depressingly substantial minority of Brits buy into anti-Muslim stereotypes. Some 28% agree that “Muslims will never be as British as other British people,” some 30% believe that “Islam is a religion of violence,” and 36% think that “Most British Muslims in the UK do not hold British values.”

Put that together with even more widespread anxiety about asylum and immigration – and the failure of successive British governments to honor their promises to “take back control” of our borders – and you have a very combustible situation that only takes the right spark to ignite, particularly when the sun is out, work is over for the weekend or the evening, and beer is being drunk to excess.

Nowadays, social media allows extreme-right agitators (often amplified by the bot-farms financed by hostile powers overseas) to tap into this worryingly deep well of mistrust and hostility by whipping up anxiety and spreading lies about tragic events like the stabbing of children in Southport near Liverpool last week which they blamed (with no truth whatsoever) on a Muslim asylum seeker.

Moreover, the situation is further inflamed by superficially respectable politicians suggesting or at least implying that those joining in the riots are not merely thugs motivated by prejudice but people with “legitimate grievances” who have supposedly been ignored by the “elite” – for instance, Reform UK’s Nigel Farage crying “We want our country back” or high-profile Conservatives using words like “invasion” as they talk endlessly about “stopping the boats” bringing asylum-seekers across the English Channel from continental Europe.

The fact that July’s general election saw the right replaced by the left in the shape of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is likely, one suspects, only to encourage them to continue playing what, it turns out, is a very dangerous game indeed.

Originally published at https://www.aa.com.tr/en/analysis/opinion-whats-behind-the-attacks-on-muslims-and-migrants-by-far-right-groups-in-the-uk/3295833

Only when nominations close on Monday can we be sure who’s formally in the running to take over the Tory leadership. But the candidates, declared and prospective, have already been setting out their stalls in the pages of this newspaper – the most read, according to surveys of Conservative Party members, by those who ultimately get to decide the winner.

Common themes are already emerging – principally the need to restore unity and discipline, as well as the party’s battered reputation for trust, integrity, delivery, and competence.

So far, so obvious – even anodyne, perhaps. But the decision to “go long” into the autumn means that, whether they want to or not, the runners and riders will end up having to talk about ideas and even (although Tories traditionally shy away from the word) “ideology”.

In so doing, they cannot help but define quite what kind of Conservative they are.

And as they begin to do so, the siren calls on whoever wins to “unite the Right” are only going to grow louder. That’s mostly because a belief seems to have calcified that the Tories’ defeat on July 4 had as much, if not more, to do with Reform UK as it did with Labour and the Lib Dems.

Yet this is moot unless we know what it actually means – or should mean – to be Right-wing today, as we approach the second quarter of the 21st century.

The Farage blend Are we, for example, talking in the main about an approach to the economy – to the relative importance of the market vs the state?

Or do we instead mean something more “cultural” – something to do with a “traditional” take on sexuality, on crime, on immigration or on the nation’s sovereignty and history, to name but a few?

The answer, of course, is both. It also revolves around how economics and culture – sometimes labelled by social scientists the Left-Right and (not altogether helpfully, perhaps) the libertarian-authoritarian dimensions – intersect and interact.

To some of the candidates, there seems to be little or no room for doubt. Those who like to think of themselves as “real Conservatives” and who routinely suggest that the party lost the election because it “wasn’t Conservative enough”, take it as read that to be a proper Tory these days you have to be both a fullthroated Thatcherite on the economy and, when it comes to cultural issues, a boys-areboys-girls-are-girls, lock-’em-up, flag-waving, statue-defender. This, in short, is the kind of Conservatism that could happily accommodate Nigel Farage, even if the implications for public services might worry some of those older, less well-heeled voters who supported Reform in their millions a few weeks ago.

The liberal Cameron mix Yet less than 20 years ago the Tory leadership contest (and soon No 10) was won by a very different Conservative, a self-styled moderniser who, along with his friends and colleagues, explicitly made it part of his pitch to both the parliamentary and extraparliamentary party that he was none of those things.

According to David Cameron, Lady Thatcher had done some great things but it was now time to move on – and the priority now could be summed up not in three words (Blair’s “Education. Education. Education.”), but in just three letters: NHS.

And, although no Tory should be seen as a soft-touch on crime, immigration and Europe, it was time to stop “banging on” about them quite so much in order to focus on what mattered most to the majority of families up and down the land.

True, in office the revealed preferences of Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, turned out to be rather different from their initial pitch.

Once in government they cut spending more than Thatcher, carried on complaining about the EU before (albeit accidentally) triggering Brexit, and allowed Andrew Lansley and Theresa May to preside over, respectively, a disastrous reorganisation of the health service and a rhetorically draconian immigration regime.

But still, it is far-fetched to imagine that either man might be entirely comfortable in a Conservative Party that elects a leader who steers a course to outflank (or even accompanied by) Nigel Farage.

Indeed Osborne, now reincarnated as a podcasting critical friend of the party he assumed he would one day lead, makes no secret of the fact that he still sees himself as a “liberal Conservative”.

By that, he and those Tories who share his outlook mean that, while they generally want to keep tax and spending as low as is consonant with maintaining an electorallycompetitive level of public services, they aren’t really that exercised about most of the cultural stuff – partly because it genuinely doesn’t bother them and partly because they figure that an increasing majority of voters seem to agree with them.

What MPs think Research on Tory MPs, albeit conducted a few years back, suggests that far more of them than many imagine agree with Osborne, even if they’re not as happy as he is to declare it publicly. That reticence may well be because their local associations are far less liberal than they are.

Nor, lest we forget, they were (or are) the first Conservative politicians to think that way.

Indeed, many of the Tory titans of the postwar era – Macmillan, Butler, Macleod, Whitelaw and Heath, to name but a few – thought pretty much the same.

Even Thatcher, after her 1975 “swamped” schtick and her 1981 British Nationality Act, didn’t bang on about immigration, although crackdowns on crime (“short, sharp, shock” anyone?) continued throughout her time in No10. Section 28, though, was hardly a pet project of hers and she was persuaded by Norman Fowler to do the right thing on Aids/HIV.

Europe, of course, remained a bugbear, but it wasn’t until the end of her premiership (and after) that it became an obsession. John Major, as he showed at the time and even more so since, was a Eurosceptic only in a strict sense – and anyone who cites “Back to Basics” to suggest he wasn’t a social liberal is making the same error as the journalists who used it as a stick with which to beat him over the antics of his sleazy colleagues.

The triumph of ‘real’ Conservatism? Liberal Conservatives, however, shouldn’t assume the electorate is totally on board with their agenda. The gold standard British Election Study, for example, suggests that far from espousing low tax and spend and a liberal social outlook, your average British voter lies slightly to the left of centre on economics and is slightly more sociallyconservative on cultural questions.

But real Conservatives need to be careful too. While the average British view of the economy really hasn’t shifted all that much, when it comes to the cultural dimension, there has been and continues to be a much more marked trend. And critically, this pronounced cultural trend has been in a socially liberal rather than socially conservative direction.

There are two obvious reasons: first because people have changed their minds about some of the issues involved (such as gay marriage, or capital punishment), and secondly because of generational replacement (a polite way of saying that those who didn’t change their minds died).

Self-styled liberal Conservatives, then, can perhaps claim to have both electoral logic and time on their side. But what they don’t have these days is the support (or at least the vocal support) of many of their colleagues or the party’s membership.

That’s because the majority of the Tory grassroots are ideologically drawn to the more purist, Farage-friendly version of Conservatism – one that they believe resonates more with the somewhat mystical (and very possibly mythical) instincts of “the people” than the version on offer from liberal Conservative candidates.

Theirs is the “real Conservatism” that, just as a reminder, is, on the economic front, all about letting people keep what they earn rather than gifting it to the taxman; cutting back on welfare and the nanny state; and freeing business from bureaucratic red tape so it can compete on “the global stage”. Meanwhile, on the cultural front, it seems increasingly to boil down to Brexit, bathrooms, boats, and boilers – how its promise has been betrayed, who should be allowed to use them, how they must be stopped, and the potentially sky-high cost of pointlessly replacing them with heat pumps.

How ‘real Conservatism’ wins Even those who don’t dedicate their lives to politics can see that it might be risky to rebuild a party after a serious defeat in a manner contradictory to the general drift of public opinion.

But the strategy behind “real Conservatism” is to appeal not to the average voter, but to particular segments of the electorate. And, as we saw on July 4, we have an electoral system that is more than capable of delivering stonking victories on nothing even approaching a majority of the vote.

This, the advocates of real Conservativism argue, was exactly what Thatcher and, more recently, Johnson was able to do in 2019 when he won over socially conservative Labour voters in “the Red Wall”, held on to low-tax Tories in “the Blue Wall” and delivered the kind of majority that the party hadn’t achieved since “the Iron Lady” had triumphed for a third successive time in 1987.

The problem, as real Conservatives see it, was that (whether it was because of Covid and Ukraine, or because Partygate did for Johnson, or because Truss went too far too fast, or because Sunak lacked panache) the last government failed to provide the two halves of that coalition with enough of what they wanted: Thatcherism for the Blue Wall and a convincing culture war for the Red.

The solution to the problem is therefore staring the party in the face. Elect a leader who agrees – and doesn’t just pretend to agree – with this analysis, and who’ll spend the next five years showing the two halves what they’re missing and persuading them to give the Tories a chance to deliver what they promised in 2019. Sorted.

How Liberal Conservatism wins Well, not quite, say more liberal Conservatives. Look first at what Johnson was actually promising back then. Yes, Brexit was high up in the mix but the whole point of getting it done, he emphasised, was to let his government get on with fixing public services and levelling up. As for the culture war stuff, yes, “taking back control” of our borders was important and he had a few lieutenants willing to be warriors if need be; but it really wasn’t a big part of his (and therefore the Tory) brand. Nor were tax or spending cuts. Indeed, all he and Sajid Javid promised on that front was what Starmer and Reeves promised this year – namely, not to raise income tax, national insurance, or VAT.

In short, what won the Tories their 80-seat majority five years ago, say liberal Conservatives, was not “real Conservatism” any more than it was “the realignment” that some of its advocates insist on continuing to talk about. Instead, it was a contingent combination of the following: Johnson’s force of personality; fear and loathing of Jeremy Corbyn; and the widespread and increasingly desperate desire to “get Brexit done” so as to get the economy moving again and to tackle problems in the public services (most obviously but not exclusively the NHS) that were beginning to seriously affect people’s daily lives.

For them, what lost the Tories their big majority a few weeks ago, was – in ascending order of importance: Sunak’s lack of personal authority; authenticity and perceived competence; tolerance of (or at least benign indifference to) Keir Starmer; and widespread frustration, first, with an economy that was continuing to flatline and failing to provide incomes that could keep pace with rising prices, and, secondly, with public services (and when it came to healthcare) that were visibly falling apart.

Why the argument over immigration is so vital Understandably, real Conservatives will bring up immigration. After all, the failure to stop Channel crossings and to stem the rise in net migration seems to have been a big concern for voters who plumped for Reform, as well as those who stuck with the Tories. They clearly bothered the average voter too.

But, as liberal Conservatives could retort, should they be brave enough, nowhere near so much as the bread and butter issues just mentioned.

Ultimately, in fact, immigration takes us not just to the heart of the difference between “real” and “liberal” Conservatives, but also to the irresolvable contradictions in each of their positions.

To a “real Conservative”, immigration threatens the very character of the country and the living standards and quality of life of its people. And yet to do anything serious to reduce it involves a massive and costly commitment on the part of the state to intervene in the labour market that cuts clean across their insistence that the market be allowed to do its work.

To a liberal Conservative, immigration is a practical inevitability that for the most part enriches the UK. And yet it provokes such anxiety among grassroots Tories, the party in the media, and many colleagues and voters, that they have to pretend to care more about it than they actually do – something that eventually catches up with them electorally.

So which candidate should win?

In an ideal world, victory in the leadership contest would go to the candidate from either side of the ideological divide honest enough to admit these contradictions in their position – or politically titanic enough to bridge them.

We have not yet seen signs of the latter.

And, in opposition and with Nigel Farage breathing down their necks, there is no sign of the former. Instead, put your money on a “real Conservative”, or else a liberal Conservative pretending to be one, to win the leadership contest. Unless they can learn to square circles, however, the odds will be longer on them winning the next general election too.

Originally published at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/27/what-does-it-mean-to-be-right-wing-today/