We are, we are told, suffering under the yoke of one of the
most right-wing governments Britain has ever had. Before coming to power, Boris
Johnson chewed over tactics with white supremacist Steve Bannon. Upon achieving
it, he has suspended Parliament, appointed a Home Secretary who has registered
her support for capital punishment and wants criminals to “literally feel
terror” and dog-whistled to racists, the far right and empire
nostalgists that he is on their side.
Indeed, the
person who first came up with the idea of proroguing Parliament is a former
Conservative special adviser, now Brexit party supporter, who convinced himself
that ex-PM David Cameron was leading a “homesexualist movement” and infecting
Britain with ‘cultural Marxism’ lifted straight out of the Frankfurt School.
So it’s plausible – for those of us who inhabit Planet Earth
– to believe that Britain is now led by a hard right nationalist party that has
brutally severed its ties (by expelling 22 MPs for example) with the saner,
moderate, liberal conservatism that preceded it. Plausible, indeed believed in
by many people, but not correct.
In fact, we are confronted by two extremes – undoubtedly
different in certain ways – but united by a dogmatic, ideological conviction
that the damage they inflict is justified and necessary.
It’s hard for people not of the Conservative persuasion –
and not under the age of 60 – to understand how David Cameron upset traditional
conservatives. Commitments to equal marriage, to disowning Section 28 and to prioritising more female and ethnic minority candidates, which appeared
to successfully‘detoxify’ the Conservative brand, were anathema to many Conservative
members who think wearing ties should be de rigueur and that Christianity
should lie at the heart of public policy. Such people are economically
Thatcherite but culturally traditionalist, which might appear contradictory,
although not to them. They are also invariably anti-EU. Cameron was tolerated
while he won elections and referendums, which all came to juddering halt in
June 2016.
But all the while, and despite protestations from esteemed
academics that he was a one-nation Conservative at heart, Cameron deepened
Thatcherism. Austerity took public sector cuts to places Thatcher could only
dream about, privatisation
was driven as far as it could go and the NHS was starved of funding like
never before while being opened up to the private sector. Anti-trade
union laws were extended, while protection against unfair dismissal was
diluted. And for the poor and disabled, Cameroonian Conservatism made the
Thatcher era look positively compassionate by comparison. The Con/Lib Dem
coalition government – followed by a year of ‘pure’ brand Cameron – left a
trail of ruined lives, deaths,
suicides,
destitution, homelessness
even self-immolation.
This was, by any fair assessment, an extreme and intensely
ideological government but its leading lights presented themselves as centrists,
modernisers and “liberal
internationalists”. That they were taken seriously by large swathes of the
media can be explained in part by the fact that their amplifiers had no
personal experience of the depredations the Tories and Lib Dems inflicted.
Those that did – though they number in the millions – were largely silent in
public debate. Hence, Brexit, which was rooted in deprived
areas hardest hit by austerity, appeared to many commentators to come out
of the wild blue.
This political mind-set has been described, by Tariq Ali for
example, as emanating from the ‘extreme
or far centre’. Its manifestation certainly wasn’t limited to Britain. The
EU imposed savage austerity on countries such as Ireland, Portugal, Greece and
Italy and in order to get its way was quite prepared to overthrow
governments and override the will of national Parliaments – in fact
proroguing the House of Commons seems almost quaint by comparison. But neither
this, nor the pursuing of secretive
trade deals with the United States, has dented its reputation as a bastion
of enlightened liberalism surrounded by populist sharks.
In Britain, the transition from David Cameron to Boris
Johnson – in which the failures of the first flow inexorably into the
predominance of the second – reveals several things. One is that the liberal
conservatism Johnson is determined to expunge from the Tory party is very
selective in the principles it is willing to stand up for. It is pro-EU and
against overt bigotry. But, as shown by the voting records of Tory dissidents
such as Dominic
Grieve and Anna
Soubry, strangely unmoved by the social callousness of the Cameron-Lib Dem
government. Hence, contemporary liberal conservatism should not be mistaken for
a rebirth of the Tory Wets of the 1980s. They – Ian
Gilmour for example – would have been outraged, primarily, by Cameron’s
inherently Thatcherite approach to social and economic policy and the human
damage it inflicted. Unfortunately, they no longer exist.
Another is the strange sight of strict austerians reneging
on their previous iron commitments to reducing public spending and controlling
the deficit, obsessions which have defined politics for the past eight years.
The chancellor, Sajid Javid, noted The Economist, “is a fan of Ayn Rand
and hangs pictures of Margaret Thatcher his office. Yet on Mr Johnson’s
instructions he announced an extra £13.8bn in election-friendly giveaways, paid
for with extra borrowing.”
However, as highlighted by this blog
last year, such flexibility is simply what happens when the Right realises
that patience with austerity is at breaking point and the consequences of
persevering with it are worse than performing an intellectual volte-face.
Undoubtedly Britain now has a ‘hard Right’ government under
Boris Johnson. But it has already experienced one for the past eight years, although
one whose sheen was that of modernising conservatism. Now some of the elite are
getting a taste of the ruthlessness that Cameron routinely meted out to
ordinary citizens. But don’t worry too much – they won’t starve.
