Blood and Soil

Race and the radicalisation of the British right

There has been a spate of commentary in recent weeks on the increasingly racist language becoming normalised on the British right (see Ben Ansell, Stephen Bush, and Robert Shrimsley).

It is undoubtedly getting worse. Here are a couple of the most egregious examples:

Former Tory and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell tweeted on the 16^th June: “Mass deportation of Pakistanis from Britain. I don’t care how long you’ve lived here. Out.” That’s two million or so people he wants to deport. Carswell is a Telegraph columnist. A few days earlier he’d written an anti-immigration screed for them which included a proposal to abolish an independent judiciary.

The current Tory shadow justice secretary, and leader-in-waiting, hasn’t gone as far as that, but did describe Pakistani immigration back in January as the importation of “hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women”. Which must have been a surprise to his fellow Tory MP Nus Ghani, and former cabinet colleague Sajid Javid.

Also this year we’ve had controversy-monger Konstantin Kisin claim that Rishi Sunak isn’t English because “he’s a brown Hindu”. One might have expected Sunak’s colleagues to condemn such obvious racism, but several defended Kisin. Suella Braverman wrote a bizarre article arguing that neither she nor Sunak are English because “for Englishness to mean something substantial, it must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity”.

More generally there is a growing insistence on a relationship between Englishness, or Britishness, and race, on the mainstream right. Sometimes this is implicit, as when Nigel Farage’s warm-up man Matt Goodwin published “research” showing white Britons would be a minority by 2070, as if this is an axiomatically a bad thing. (As it happens it also doesn’t appear to be true ). Goodwin has also endorsed Kisin’s theory of Englishness.

Sometimes the racial element is hidden behind “concerns” about our “traditional culture”, as in a recent nostalgia rant from the professionally outraged Lord Frost which complained that “we are disconnecting from the old Britain” because of immigrants and the woke. Amusingly he concluded his piece with a stirring line from one of George Orwell’s most famous essays The Lion and the Unicorn:

“We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.”

Had the noble Lord looked up a few lines above, in the same paragraph, he’d have spotted Orwell arguing that “[England] is not being true to herself while the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps, and company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Profits Tax.” Maybe he was too disconnected from our past.

The dangers of this shift in language are well articulated by Ben, Stephen and Robert, but I want to do something a bit different and look at how and why it’s happened. Because it shows us something important about how different the radical right approach to politics is from the centre-right of the 2000s. Then I want to look at why the centre/centre-left is failing to contain this kind of language, and what it needs to do differently.