Poison spreading: the conversion of the Conservative party to radical Nationalism

Cameron had to do it. He had no choice. UKIP had grown to a consistent 10% in the polls and looked certain to doom the Conservatives to another defeat to Labour, having only just succeeded in getting back into government through a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. 13 years in opposition would likely be followed by another 10 after only one stint in government. Something had to be done. And so in January of 2013, David Cameron gave a speech committing his party to an In/Out referendum on membership of the European Union.

That is the classic story used to explain why the UK held the 2016 referendum. It's useful for a number of interested groups. Those close to Cameron can portray themselves as victims of circumstance rather than instigators and agents responsible for their own actions. Nigel Farage and his acolytes can use it to boost the perception of their role and influence in British politics. And Brexit sympathisers across politics, the media and academia can use it to show that the referendum was in some sense 'necessary', a kind of force of nature that had to be given free rein or else other, (supposedly) more terrifying consequences would have ensued.

And yet, this story is completely wrong. British populism. and more correctly English Nationalism, was not an exogenous shock that suddenly appeared on the scene of UK politics in the early 2010s. It was not a new party that forced a choice of 'follow or die' on one of Britain's main parties. Rather it was a poison that slowly grew from the mid-2000s and which found its home in the very heart of the Conservative party.

The Conservative party has long had its anti-European 'headbangers' but not so long ago this faction was essentially small and weak. Initially, there was not much more than soft Euroscepticism in the party. After all, they had championed the European Convention on Human Rights and the Single Market. It was a Conservative Prime Minister who brought the UK into the European Community in 1973. Sure, they were more Eurosceptic than Labour but they were hardly radically different from other centre-right economically liberal parties in countries like the Netherlands, Ireland or Denmark. Things started to change when Thatcher became much more confrontational towards the end of her premiership, though even then it soon became party orthodoxy that the infighting over Europe during Major's time in office was both a failure for the Eurosceptics (many ended up letting the Maastricht Treaty pass anyway) and highly destructive for the party, helping Labour stay in power for more than a decade.

So how did this hardline anti-EU faction come to completely dominate the party and reshape the course of UK politics? In 2005, David Cameron was vying for the leadership of the Conservative party and he had a problem. He had got through to the second round but Liam Fox, supported by the right of the party, had performed much better than expected. In September, Fox had succeeded in proving his anti-EU credentials to the hardliners by saying that he would pull the Conservatives out of the European People's Party (EPP), the moderate centre-right (and pro-EU) grouping in the European Parliament. Fox's support was not exclusively Eurosceptic but it did help strengthen his position. Cameron calculated that in order to defeat his main rival, David Davis, he needed to make a big promise to the anti-EU section of his party. After all, the supporters of the other main candidate in the race, the committed European Kenneth Clarke, would likely rally to Cameron anyway. And so Cameron made the promise that would define his approach to right-wing Nationalism: 'vote for me, I'll do it too'.

In November of 2005, Cameron matched Fox's promise. This was not received uncritically within the party, including at the European level. At the time, ConservativeHome reported that the European parliamentary grouping was roughly split into thirds on the issue. One third for the split with the EPP, one third against and one third neutral. Of those who were neutral, most were likely opposed to changing group in principle rather than being enthusiastically in favour of the EPP's values. When looking at the old Conservative MEPs at the time and those who were elected in the 2009 European Parliament election compared to the current set, it is notable how few of the pro-European faction are still involved in European politics now. A number have left politics entirely, with a particular drop-off around 2014 (the date of the next European Parliament elections). Of those who are still around, it is the anti-EU politicians, those who pushed for the Conservatives to leave the EPP like Daniel Hannan, Geoffrey Van Orden or Syed Kamall, who are in positions of power and influence within the European Conservative party. This break therefore is when the soul of the party started to change.

In leaving the EPP, the Conservatives weren't just finding a more comfortable position ideologically - it wasn't simply a question of presentation. It radically changed who they socialised with and the kinds of people (and ideologies) they started to view as their most natural friends and allies. In the European Parliament there are numerous benefits to being part of a wider group and there was concern that simply being unaffiliated would firmly demonstrate that the party was isolated and was sitting alongside extremists. So to address these problems, the Conservatives set out to create a new group: the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). The core of the group was built around an alliance between the Conservatives and the Polish party, Law and Justice (PiS). Law and Justice is a right-wing populist party with strong views against abortion, LGBT rights and non-EU migration. More recently PiS has come under increasing scrutiny for its attacks on the rule of law and the attempt to place the independent judiciary under political control. Right at the start this new friendship caused some consternation within the Conservative delegation, with Edward McMillan-Scott in particular denouncing PiS. McMillan-Scott had served as the leader of the Conservative MEPs from 1997 to 2001 and was elected Vice-President of the European Parliament four times during his time as an MEP. And for all he may have been one of the most influential and effective UK MEPs (particularly from the Conservative party), when he called out the racist and homophobic views within PiS, he was stripped of the Conservative whip. The elimination of the pro-European, liberal wing of the party was underway.

Even with all its problems, the alliance with PiS was just the start of the Conservative party's moral degradation. PiS was one of the more moderate and 'respectable' elements of this new grouping the Conservatives were embracing. Another minor party to join the group from the start (in June 2009) was the Czech Civic Democracy Party. The Czech President at the time was from the same party and was openly a climate change denier. The previous Czech Prime Minister, Mirek Topolánek, was also from this party and had been ousted by the Czech Parliament just earlier that year. Topolánek has regularly been involved in controversies relating to Nazi rhetoric and anti-Semitic views. In 2010 he was forced to resign as leader of his party after comments in an interview that suggested Jews and gay people lack moral character.

The Latvian 'For Fatherland and Freedom' is a further example of the extreme nature of the founding members of the ECR. In 2009 it was arguably a more moderate party, though even then there was a controversy around some of its members celebrating Latvian Nazi collaborators. But since allying with 'All for Latvia' in 2011, it has become a fully ethnonationalist party, with a strident opposition to all immigration and refugees. To these two we can also add the Dutch Christian fundamentalist ChristenUnie, a party opposed to abortion and gay marriage. And the Hungarian Democratic Forum (now defunct) and List Dedecker (now Libertarian, Direct, Democratic) were again both right-wing populists. It's fair to ask whether there were in fact any moderates among the Conservative's new friends. There was only one moderate MEP in this new group, who came from the Finnish Centre Party. However, even this was only due to a defection; the party itself sat (and still sits) with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE).

In rejecting the centre-right, pro-EU stream of European politics, the Conservatives did not simply shift to a position of moderate criticism towards the EU. They invested heart and soul in alliances with Nationalists and the far-right. Since its founding, the character of the grouping and the links Conservative MEPs have chosen have only become more extreme. Whether the Danish People's Party, the Finns Party, the Brothers of Italy, the Sweden Democrats or new entrants like Forum for Democracy or Debout La France, the Conservative party's association with nationalists, racists, homophobes and post-fascists has moved beyond questions of convenience and towards a meeting of minds.

And as the Conservative party continued down the path into xenophobic Nationalism, it did so virtually unchallenged. How could this have happened? The main reason was that the vanguard of this transformation was occurring at the European level. The historic disinterest of the UK's politics and media in this part of our political lives allowed the party to pursue alliances that at the national level would have been electoral suicide and would have provoked an uprising in the party. Yet at the European level these were essentially ignored. The increasing ignorance of the opposition towards affairs in the EU also contributed to this. In 1999, reports that the Conservative anti-EU MPs were in discussions with the neo-fascist Alleanza Nazionale led to attacks and taunts in Westminster. The Conservative Westminster hardliners had to back away and deny any connection. By contrast, the admission of Alleanza Nazionale's successor, the Brothers of Italy, to the ECR this year has barely registered. The tragedy for the moderate section of the Conservative party is that while they thought the party was modernising under Cameron and shifting away from a reactionary form of conservatism, they had seemingly no idea that they were locked in a life or death struggle with the Nationalist wing for the future of the party and that the frontline was their delegation of MEPs. From 2009, the moderates started to lose a war they did not even know they were fighting.

By the time of the 2014 European Parliament elections, there was only one winner - the pro-European moderates were nearly all gone. It's impossible at this stage to imagine that the Conservative party was ever a member of the EPP at all, let alone that they could shift back to the mainstream European centre-right and rejoin the group. From domination at the European level, the Nationalist faction of the Conservative party then moved into the national level. Many of the prominent Conservative Brexiteers in the Westminster party are good friends with their European counterparts, united by their shared worldview - a Nationalist dogma beneath a thin (but likely self-convincing) veil of libertarianism. It's important to understand that knowledge about the EU, how it works and what it does, is very low among your average Westminster politician. MEPs play a fairly crucial role in transferring knowledge back to the national party. Therefore when it came to discussions about the EU within the party, the Westminster faction was no longer opposed by the European delegation, as they had been in the past under figures like McMillan-Scott. Instead of pushback when they peddled half-truths or outright lies about the EU, the Westminster anti-EU MPs were met with an echo chamber from their European Parliament counterparts, reverberating through the party and its allies in the media.

And it is through this latter group that the transformation of the party continued and accelerated. Major national newspapers like the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Sun and Daily Express have become increasingly right-wing and hardline. Anti-migrant stories and anti-EU lies form the core of their reporting on an almost daily basis. In 2016 the Council of Europe's human rights watchdog expressed serious concern at the levels of political intolerance and hate speech in the UK media. Even the BBC's coverage of the EU has been deemed to be mostly negative. Far from providing a break or check on increasing intolerance and extremism among Conservative politicians, those newspapers that were most closely aligned to the party actively pushed them down that road. In the wake of the referendum, anti-Semitic dog whistles have become increasingly common and those Conservative MPs (alongside those of other parties) who do not follow the Nationalist ideology have been branded as 'mutineers' and 'traitors'. Indeed anyone who steps out of line, even in the legitimate and democratic exercise of their functions, can now become an 'enemy of the people'.

While the voices of the Nationalist right grew stronger and more powerful, the leadership of the Conservative party gave up any pretence at trying to moderate it. In her time as party leader and as Prime Minister, Theresa May has regularly failed to defend members of her party under attack by the media. Indeed she herself is not incapable of taking cheap shots at MPs, accusing them of being responsible for the repeated failure of her Brexit deal and of playing 'political games'. Rather than admitting her own failings, she sought to promote populist outrage, pitting the public against their representatives, all while declaring: 'I am on your side'. In the wider cabinet, most ministers now regularly compete to be more hardline and anti-EU than the others, talking up the idea of a 'No Deal' Brexit, one of the most extreme and dangerous policy positions ever to have been articulated in mainstream UK debate.

There is still a reasonable contingent of moderate MPs in the Conservative party but no one could seriously argue that they are in control now. Some have been forced out or have quit the party out of horror at what it has become. Others have been cowed into submission for fear of the wrath of the media, their colleagues or violent extremists. Finally, the rest, a now powerful and growing group, have simply embraced the Nationalist turn in full, either giving voice to views they have long held or converting to the new dogma in order to advance their own careers.

Nationalism is now the main ideological plank of the Conservative party. It is rife within the party at every level - the membership, local, national and European politicians. This shift, the decision to call the referendum and everything that has come since was not inevitable. Accommodation and collaboration with the Nationalists wasn't forced. It was a willing choice. The Cameroons might have been pulled there reluctantly, but it was Conservative MPs, MEPs and members who brought them there, not UKIP. The emergence of UKIP and the morally narrow justification of base domestic political self-interest was only the latest excuse for an increasingly powerful faction in the UK's historic 'party of government' that was constantly looking for excuses to reform the party into a militantly hard-right organisation. The number of Conservatives either openly or implicitly giving their support to Nigel Farage's Brexit Party only reinforces this conclusion.

Many Conservatives will lean on the progressive achievements of the past in order to rebuff these truths. But can anyone really imagine the party of today passing legislation like gay marriage? The reality is that that party is dead. Moderates may not like it but the most important thing they can do is recognise that they have lost and that the party they once thought they belonged to is no more. Whether members, councillors, MPs or MEPs, none of them should give their loyalty to a party that has foresworn relations with the moderate centre-right. And this is not only a wake-up call to pro-Europeans. The Conservatives no longer stand for mainstream Euroscepticism but for the anti-Semitic, xenophobic authoritarianism of Viktor Orban and other extremists like him. There are arguments aplenty but when it comes down to it, there's no positive spin for counting so-called 'post-fascists' among your allies.

The other matter of urgency is that we dispense with, and challenge wherever found, the notion that the 2016 referendum somehow immunised the UK against the populist wave - an idea often spread by the 'intellectual wing' of this movement. On the contrary, as soon as we understand that this phenomenon is not the exclusive monopoly of UKIP (old and new) or the Brexit Party, it becomes evident the Nationalist right is far more powerful in the UK than in almost any other European country. Related to this, the idea that this threat to democracy, openness and tolerance in the UK could somehow be defeated by acceding to its demands is equally dangerous and misleading. In pushing ahead with Brexit, even under its most extreme guise of 'No Deal', the only consequence will be to lend greater legitimacy to the Nationalists and the far-right. Anyone who believes they would stop once the UK had left the European Union, simply back up their bags and return to moderate, liberal, centre-right politics is nothing more than a useful idiot to the forces of hate and extremism.

None of this was forced or inevitable. The pressure from UKIP's growth in the mid-2010s did not dictate this path. But the character of the Conservative party, a party that was steadily transformed over a number of years, starting with its delegation in the European Parliament, into a bastion of hard-right Nationalism, that was defining. There were many ways to respond to UKIP and the way the Conservative party responded, first through accommodation, then through the wholesale adoption of UKIP's policy platform, that was the result of what the Conservative party was becoming and what it has now become. We do not have a moderate centre-right party anymore. We have a right-wing Nationalist one that radicalised itself from the inside, and a large section of the media is this party's ally. We are not an exception. We are not immune. This is our country now. The sooner we reckon with this reality, the sooner we can do something about it.


Image via Flickr