Lizzie ❤️ MAGA

The Nasty Party Just Got Nastier

Last month I wrote a piece here about the descent of the Conservative Party into Trump-style MAGA extremism. This wasn’t intended to be nostalgic: I have no fond memories of the Conservative governments of the past. But anyone who doubts that the Tory Party has embraced extremist ideas that would have been anathema to its predecessors should consider the grim series of events that unfolded last week.

Our story begins in America, where Liz Truss popped up at Trump’s CPAC conference to plug her book Ten Years to Save the West - a title, coming from her, to rival Harold Shipman’s Better Living for the Third Age or The Katie Hopkins Guide to Empathy and Compassion. On this side of the pond, the idea that a politician with Truss’s catastrophic record could save anything at all tends to prompt a hysterical belly-laugh, but the Trumpies will embrace anyone who embraces them, and Truss is pretty much the same.

And so she sat earnestly in conference next to Nigel Farage, before delivering a shrill speech on the decline of the West and how she needed Americans to help her save it, ‘cos she can’t do it alone. This nonsense was followed by an interview with the fraudster, insurrectionist, white nationalist and Walmart Goebbels-gone-to-seed, Steve Bannon. In a hallucinatory exchange, even by Truss’s dire standards, the most spectacular failure in British political history blamed the collapse of her government on the ‘administrative state,’ i.e. the ‘deep state’ that the MAGA/QAnon zealots know controls everything we do and think.

Holding up a copy of the Financial Times, Truss denounced its writers as ‘the friends of the deep state’ and called for a ‘bigger bazooka’ to blow them all to metaphorical smithereens. These wild fantasies were delivered with the same conviction with which I, if I were to fall from a great height and hit my head on the pavement, might testify to seeing multicoloured piglets in tutus floating past as I waited for an ambulance or the Angel of Death.

But Liz can’t be tamed. She lapped up Bannon’s adulation of Nigel Farage, saying that she would welcome him into her party and work with ‘whoever it takes to make our country successful’. An actual journalist rather than a propagandist might have noted this beyond satire moment, considering Farage’s record, and hers. But Bannon is only interested in people he can use, and Truss might as well have worn a sign saying ‘use me.’ And so the following jaw-dropping exchange then took place:

Bannon: Nigel Farage said yesterday that you’re going to have a radical Islamic party have seats in the Commons in the next election. Do you believe that’s true?

Truss: Well, there’s going to be a by-election in the next few weeks, and it could be a radical Islamic party wins, so that is a possibility.

Bannon: You’re saying a radical Islamic party, in a couple of weeks in a special election…is it one of these midland urban areas that that they had the-?

Truss: Rochdale

Bannon: The one that’s had the rape situation?

Truss: Yes.

Bannon: The grooming situation?

Truss: Yes.

Bannon: Hang on, I don’t understand this. The grooming situation Tommy Robinson and all these heroes fought it, the rape situation, and in that community you’re going to have a special election and you may have a radical jihadist party send someone to the Commons, after all that problems?

Truss: That is correct.

If it bothered any leading Tory that a former prime minister was accepting praise heaped on Farage and ‘Tommy Robinson and all those heroes’, we have yet to hear from them. And as much as I dislike George Galloway, he is the one who may win the Rochdale bye-election, not a radical Islamic party. Yet there was a former British PM, butter not melting in her mouth, giving Bannon exactly the radical Muslim grooming gang/immigrant rapist red meat that he and his followers feed on.

But as mad and bad as Truss clearly is, she wasn’t the only one pontificating about the forthcoming Muslim takeover of British politics last week.

The Ceasefire Debate that Wasn’t

And here, our story moves to Westminster, where the two main political parties sought to avoid paying any political price for their cowardly complicity in the ongoing massacre in Gaza. Whether or not you think that the SNP’s original motion with its denunciation of Israel’s ‘collective punishment’ of Gaza was a cynical ‘trap’ for Labour, or simply an expression of deeply-held principle, this was not a debate that reflected well on anyone involved in it. If any of its participants had really wanted to reach a consensual position calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, they could have found the words to express it.

Instead each of them seemed to be trying to avoid political damage for themselves, or to inflict damage on each other. So far, so par for the course, in present-day UK politics. But if there is one talent that Tories still have, it’s the ability to make a bad situation worse. So, when the House Speaker Lindsay Hoyle claimed that he had adopted Labour’s motion, not because he feared being sacked, but because he was concerned about the safety of MPs, some of Sunak’s MPs stirred from their sullen slumber and argued that Labour, and even the entire country, had succumbed to the deadly embrace of Islam.

No one will be surprised to find the Right Dishonourable Robert Jenrick amongst them. In the last two years, the former immigration minister and home secretary has established a reputation for performative cruelty in his treatment of migrants that makes Suella Braverman look like someone from Call the Midwife. Fresh from salivating over Texas governor Greg Abbott’s anti-migrant buoys in the Rio Grande, Crooked Bob was in parliament the day after the debate, arguing:

The real issue is not the party political shenanigans suggested by the shadow leader of this house. The real issue is that this house appears cowed by threats of violence and intimidation. The mother of parliaments appears weakened and diminished as a result. We have allowed our streets to be dominated by Islamist extremists, and British Jews and others to be too intimidated to walk through central London week after week. And now we’re allowing Islamist extremists to intimidate British members of Parliament.

This is precisely the kind of thing we have come to expect from Jenrick, and as usual, there was a yawning chasm between his words and reality, not that he cared.

It is not at all clear how Hoyle’s decision to allow a motion that was actually weaker in its condemnation of Israel than the one that the SNP originally wanted, represents a successful example of ‘intimidation.’ Nor is there any evidence that there actually was such intimidation. And lastly, the idea that pro-Palestinian marchers or protestors against the Gaza war are ‘Islamist extremists’ is a unsubstantiated smear.

But when Tories smell blood, they can’t get to it quickly enough. The Leader of the House, Midshipwoman Penny Mordaunt, told Jenrick, ‘I could not agree more with the right honourable member. British Jews are suffering a grotesque level of hatred and abuse, which quite frankly shames our country.’

Something does indeed shame our country, but without a decent mirror, the likes of Jenrick and Mordaunt are never likely to find it. Are British Jews suffering a ‘grotesque level of hatred and abuse’? Statistics certainly demonstrate that antisemitism has risen sharply since the Hamas attacks on 7 October. According to the Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors anti-Jewish abuse and attacks, there have been 4,103 reported antisemitic incidents in the last four months - a 589 % increase compared with the previous year.

These are grim figures. The barrier between anti-Zionism and antisemitism may be thin, but it must be recognized, by all concerned. It is the responsibility of all communities and organizations involved in the Palestinian solidarity movement to do what they can to ensure that Jews are not abused or held responsible for the crimes of the Israeli state because they are Jews.

But equally, it is the responsibility of politicians to recognize the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and not deliberately conflate the two, even if that is what Israel does. Because if antisemitism has risen as a result of this latest deadly phase in the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, that does not mean that the pro-Palestinian protests are responsible for this.

Statistics also show that Islamophobia has risen steeply since last November. The charity Tell Mama has reported the ‘greatest rise in reported anti-Muslim hate cases’ since 7 October - a 355 percent rise compared with the same timescale the previous year. As is the case with reported antisemitic attacks, these 2,010 reported incidents include abusive behaviour, threats, vandalism, online abuse and discrimination.

In this volatile situation, we need calm, honest, principled, and sensitive politicians, who can do their best to ensure that these tensions are not exacerbated to the point of no return. Such politicians are conspicuously absent from a faction-ridden Tory party in freefall, that is not doing its best, but its worst, and which is increasingly prepared to embrace even the most toxic and extremist positions in a desperate attempt to save itself, or simply to distract from its collusion in the Gaza slaughter.

In an article in the ceasefire debate in the Telegraph, Suella Braverman - no surprise here - warned that ‘Islamists are in charge of Britain now’; and that Britain is ‘sleepwalking into a ghettoised society where free expression and British values are diluted. Where sharia law, the Islamist mob and anti-Semites take over communities.’

Commenting on Braverman’s column on his GB ‘news’ show, Lee Anderson - the posh Tory’s idea of the ideal working class person - gave a more nuanced view, and claimed that only London had been taken over by the ‘Islamists’, because Sadiq Khan had ‘given our capital city away to his mates.’ Elaborating further, Anderson claimed:

We’ve got a very cowardly Khan running London, and he seems to be letting not only the Jewish population down but the whole population of London and Britain as a whole. I heard some of the comments Suella made earlier this week and I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan, and they’ve got control of London, and they’ve got control of Starmer as well.

Anyone who has spent any time on Twitter will know that Sadiq Khan has been a target of this kind of abuse from the likes of Katie Hopkins and other extreme-right ‘London has fallen’ types for years, and no one who knows anything about Lee Anderson will be surprised to find him using antisemitism in an attempt to damage his former party.

This time - finally! - Sunak acted, and withdrew the whip from his erstwhile salt-of-the-earth party chairman. A belated crackdown on Islamophobia? Not quite. Downing Street then revealed that Anderson had been asked to apologise for his words, and refused.

As a result, Anderson had the whip withdrawn not for saying a bad thing, but for not saying sorry about the bad thing that he said. And as for what he said, Oliver Dowden - a politician whose face always suggests a man living on a permanent diet of nettles - was on the Laura Kuenssberg show telling viewers that he didn’t ‘believe Lee Anderson said those remarks intending to be Islamophobic’, it was just that his remarks ‘could be taken that way.’

Given the opportunity to apologise for the fact that he used words that could have been misinterpreted, Anderson refused, and that’s why he lost the whip, though Dowden didn’t rule out the possibility that he might come back. You can see Dowden’s problem here. To condemn Anderson’s words as Islamophobic would mean condemning Jenrick, Braverman, and Truss too, since all three of them had said variations on the same thing. As principled stands against prejudice and bigotry go, this one leaves something to be desired. But Dowden is right about one thing: If you argue that the mayor of London has handed the capital over to ‘Islamists’, then it could indeed be taken as Islamophobic. But what did the leader of this shambles think?

Finally, on Sunday, Rishi Sunak told us, in a statement condemning the ‘explosion in prejudice and antisemitism since the Hamas terrorist attacks,’ because ‘Simply put, antisemitism is racism. And speaking as someone who has experienced racism, I know it when I see it.’

Head Boy may or may not have experienced racism, but he has also weaponised it for political gain, or simply been to weak to stand up to certain forms of racism that didn’t suit his government’s interests. And so he praised his own immigrant family for ‘embracing and serving their new community’, unlike those - you know who they are - responsible for ‘the violence, intimidation and intolerance for others we have seen infect our streets recently.’

In case Head Boy’s readers didn’t get it, Sunak echoed Jenrick’s characterisation of last week’s ceasefire debate as a watershed moment in which a ‘dangerous signal was sent that intimidation works.’

You don’t need a PhD in cultural studies or media analysis to understand what is going on here. For Sunak and his party, the only racism worth recognising and condemning is the one they can use. Having squeezed what rank political capital they could out of the ‘Stop the Boats’ - even laying bets on it, such larks - they are now moving into Melanie Phillips/Douglas Murray/Bat Y’eor land: where every opponent of Israel is an antisemite, and every Muslim opponent of Israel is ‘un-British’ or ‘anti-Western’ and engaged in a plot to take over the country and perhaps the world.

I’m old enough to remember when such things were said about a very different ethnic and racial group. But the extreme-right has re-aligned over the years, and on the evidence of last week, there are significant sectors of the Tory Party willing to re-align with it in an attempt to damage Labour and silence criticisms of Israel’s actions in Gaza at the same time.

If that means spreading paranoid ‘Londonistan’ conspiracy theories and establishing a hierarchy of racisms entirely for political purposes, so be it.

There are some Tories who have spoken out against this. Robert Buckland has condemned his Tory colleagues for stoking racial hatred and division. Ruth Davidson has said her party is better than this, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Sayeeda Warsi, as one would expect, has been as forthright as she usually is about the toxic forces devouring her party.

But those of us who are not Tories should not rely on Tories to cure their party of the disease their party is suffering from. Because as bad as the Tories are now, they can get a lot worse. And the Gaza war can also get a lot worse. And whatever positions we take on the conflict, we should do what we can to ensure that no member of any community is abused, attacked or denigrated because of the community they come from.

And in these difficult times, it is up to all of us to call out unscrupulous political actors who seek to polarise society for political gain. Because issues like racism and free speech are too important to be used merely to advance careers or party self-interest, and silence criticism of the merciless slaughter that is still far from over.