The end of right-wing deference

And how to exploit the crisis of the British establishment

It’s often said that the British state operates in a tyrannical, postmodern fashion. While there are indeed some similarities to ’80s-style Communist repression — so-called ‘soft’ cancellations were common until very recently, and many people are obviously in prison for what they have said in on social media — it remains the case that, for the most part, it’s actually a refracted dystopia though a wibbly kaleidoscope; a world of five-foot-tall, overweight ‘WPCs’ wielding a taser with grubby lanyards, not stony-faced NKVD men kicking people into a ditch for reading Keats.

Internationally, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the re-election of Donald Trump clearly shifted the political dial; this coincided with long-standing anger about immigration and the economy in Britain finally bubbling up to the surface, and the autopsies (and partial end of right-wing media restraint) that followed the Conservative Party’s landslide defeat last July. For the first time in a generation, the British Right is on the offensive. A party principally known for complaining about immigration are currently projected to win a landslide majority from a base of five seats.

The Starmer Government is under siege; seemingly in a permanent state of panic. To describe Labour’s rhetoric as incoherent would be generous. Their messaging and action is hollow and contradictory. The welcome (though insufficient) changes they are making to Indefinite Leave to Remain are already being offset by the signing of a ‘youth mobility deal’ with the European Union which, in practice, will inevitably serve as a mechanism for EU member states to offload their own unwanted migrants onto us. For those readers still operating under the assumptions of ’90s and early ’00s ‘triangulation’, this approach has backfired, alienating Labour’s left-wing base while not succeeding in winning support, in terms of actual votes, from more right-leaning swing voters. It is an attempt to chuck something at those who feel they lost the Referendum while winning it, and something else at those who feel they lost the Referendum while losing it. This will not work: the former will hear only the word ‘EU’; the latter, only nativist caterwauling.

All this has triggered a crisis of confidence not seen in the British establishment since Suez and Profumo. The general omertà and censoriousness plaguing our society has, for now, receded somewhat. Whilst the judiciary is increasingly (and increasingly transparently) authoritarian, there is real momentum building on the Right; even Keir Starmer talks of an ‘open borders experiment’ leading to an ‘Island of Strangers’. It’s therefore worth reflecting on how such a tightly-controlled environment was able to persist for so long.

It has become increasingly obvious that for fully twenty-five years, from 1995 to 2020, this country had no functional and competitive right-wing presence beyond Euroscepticism. Much has been said about the topics that remain taboo around the Islington dinner table, and while this observation holds true — Sarah Vine, the ex-wife of Michael Gove, famously noted that she lost friends over Brexit — the causes of this political vacuum deserve more scrutiny than this very easy, somewhat faux-proletarian observation. After all, arguably more damaging than any single policy failure has been the Right’s chronic aversion to conflict. There are, of course, already endless pop-intellectual analyses of this phenomenon, usually from post-liberals churning out safely subversive essays on class dynamics (often blaming it upon something inherent to the British national character; our early industrialisation and lack of revolutions). But these usually seriously miss the mark, conflating cause and effect.

In truth, much can be explained by the simple fact that a relatively homogenous media establishment held an iron grip on public discourse, something that was especially true of its more high-brow elements. Much like an immune system reacting to a foreign body, the old media instinctively recognised that social media was a threat; not just financially, but politically also. Anyone who dissented was automatically dismissed as being ‘Extremely Online’ (a surreal accusation given that no-one is more pathologically glued to social media than a broadsheet columnist); or, alternatively, they were accused of ‘Americanisation’ (an accusation that, equally surreally, often came directly from the mouths of the most fanatical and unthinking Atlanticists in the country). This meant that conservatives, like you in the office, had to get on with everyone else; and, in practice, that meant agreeing with one another, often at the expense of their voters. Jacob Rees-Mogg is perhaps the most egregious example of this: he was happy to LARP as a charming toff to entertain them if it meant that his private opinions stayed private.

There is also something to Peter (Patricia) Hitchens’ observation, by way of Michael Oakeshott, that the Conservative Party is more of a ‘disposition’ than a political movement. (S)he’s not wrong: it’s full of people in mustard blazers who go weak at the knees for crumbling shire churches, which these days are more likely than not to feature tattered Ukraine and LGBT flags inside — ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’ indeed.

Nowhere is this tendency more obvious than in the latter-day cult of Thatcher. For the avoidance of doubt, Thatcher was our best leader since 1945. She embodied Britain’s natural commercial instincts: it was, after all, the British East India Company that conquered the entirety of India. The deputy editor of Pimlico Journal once remarked to me that while passing through Brentford, he hadn’t met a single person employed by the British state. And that comment stuck with me far more than anything said by Thatcher’s most enthusiastic admirers, who often seem more interested in political cosplay than the substance of what she represented. Thatcher wasn’t an icon in a power suit. No: she was the very embodiment of Britain’s yeoman class.

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So, what is to be done?

A simple, if blunt, answer is that the people who made up the right-wing establishment prior to the previous election are all basically useless and should be replaced entirely. While I have some sympathy for this view, one must be cautious not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The main mechanism by which MAGA was able to shift the Overton window wasn’t by purging the establishment, but by persuading — and at times bullying — its more pliable elements. Marco Rubio now uses rhetoric that, just five years ago, would have been confined to obscure identitarian forums. Charlie Kirk’s road-to-Damascus moment is well documented: to give but one example, Kirk once lauded Martin Luther King Jr as a hero; he has since reversed his stance, describing King as ‘awful’ and criticising the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a ‘huge mistake’.

Even here in Britain, Toby Young’s Free Speech Union has achieved remarkable things. In the past, it pointedly refused to do anything to protest the legal persecution of far-right activist Sam Melia; nowadays, however, it is actively standing up for someone like Lucy Connolly. This kind of support for a woman who called for ‘mass deportation now’, adding ‘set fire to all the… hotels [housing asylum seekers]… for all I care’ would have been literally unthinkable just twelve months ago.

This shift is now being felt more broadly across the electorate. Credit where credit is due: much of the momentum comes from Boomers, long-time Tory loyalists, switching their support to Reform, triggering a kind of national preference cascade. (And of course, the occasional reminder of just how deviant some former Tory MPs are hasn’t hurt either.) While we shouldn’t forget who was and wasn’t ahead of the curve, obsessing over this is not helpful to us achieving our ends. A middle ground can be found, especially for those who were less directly involved in what came before.

Another solution is to place the younger generation, including (perhaps even especially) those who have experienced cancellation, into positions of real power. One reason the American Right has regained momentum is that it has elevated a cohort of these relatively young, angry, and highly motivated men to the forefront of the movement. A good example is Darren Beattie: a former Trump speechwriter, fired in 2018 for attending a conference alongside white nationalists, now serving as the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a powerful post in the State Department. It is perhaps no coincidence that this same State Department now seems particularly concerned about the state of free speech in Britain.

By contrast, many British Tories, especially the older ones, tend to be wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the worst excesses of the Left. While they may have endured criticism or abuse — David Starkey is perhaps a rare exception, but then was rather brutally cancelled at the height of the Summer of Floyd — they often haven’t been the true victims, certainly not in the way others have. This lack of ‘lived experience’, to borrow from the Woke, makes it harder for them to take bold or uncomfortable decisions.

Informal networks already exist, and you may know someone who has been treated unfairly by the powers that be. This awareness could become a key competency; one that think tanks or researchers might find especially valuable. It’s far easier to gut pensions for state apparatchiks if those same people once tried to ruin your life over a relatively minor tweet. Revenge, after all, is a dish best served cold.

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Image credits: Katy Blackwood, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

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This article was written by LaoCaiLarry, a Pimlico Journal contributor. You can subscribe to his Substack here. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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