In last Monday's Guardian you could read both John Harris describing his dismay at the right's "ballooning narrative about complete social breakdown" and Nesrine Malik noting that the call for the deportation of immigrants has become mainstream. Harris inevitably felt the need to drag in the left as a pointless comparison: "Just as people on the left have been predicting for at least 150 years that capitalism is about to chaotically implode under the weight of its own contradictions, so some of the loudest voices on the post-Brexit right have come up with their own version of a similarly historic meltdown: a vision of the immediate future in which rampant wokery, crime, failed immigration policy, weak policing and general establishment decay and corruption will lead inexorably to what Nigel Farage calls 'societal collapse'." Leaving aside the crude strawman, not to mention the plentiful evidence that capitalism is trashing the planet, the point to note here is Harris's belief that this is a new development on the right, with the none-too subtle hint that the left remains trapped in the past so we shouldn't look for any answers there.
Similarly, the normally acute Malik falls into the trap of assuming that the calls for mass deportation are novel. She is correct that this language has been amplified by politicians in recent years, notably by Keir Starmer, but she is mistaken in claiming that "the last time a member of a political party even hinted at any sort of deportation policy was in the late 00s, when British National party leader Nick Griffin ... stated that he would 'encourage' voluntary repatriation of legal migrants and 'those of foreign descent to return to their lands of ethnic origin'." There been plenty of hints in the interevening period. After all, what do you imagine most people think when they hear the phrase "one in, one out"? And repatriation was never limited to the neo-Nazis, as Enoch Powell's many supporters proved. In fact, both ideas - that society is coming apart at the seams and that immigrants should be "sent back" - have been common among Tories since the 1960s when the Monday Club was founded. The views may not have been considered respectable by many Conservative grandees, but they were common among the rank and file. Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979 owed much to both: the belief that the country was falling apart during the "Winter of Discontent" and the perception that immigration left many people feeling, as she put it, "swamped".
Going further back, in 1945 Winston Churchill infamously predicted that a Labour victory under Clement Attlee would lead to the creation of a British Gestapo. This wasn't a lunatic exaggeration fuelled by too much champagne but simply the continuation of pre-war practice. Between 1919 and 1924 the Conservative Party defined itself primarily around the anti-Bolshevik "Red Scare", culminating in the notorious Zinoviev letter, a forgery published by the Daily Mail to (successfully) damage Labour's chances in the general election. The mainstream right have always been hysterical when out of power, or facing that prospect, and the form this takes is invariably hyperbolic warnings about threats to our way of life emanating from a coalition of foreigners, traitors and idiot do-gooders. In its contemporary guise, Bolsheviks and sandal-wearing vegetarians have been replaced by rapacious asylum-seekers and trans rights activists. There's nothing novel in anything that either Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick has said lately, though there is an important difference in their manner of delivery.
Pessimism is the natural tenor of conservative thought. The roots of the right's philosophy lie in the Hobbesian vision of a war of all against all, not in Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott's eulogisation of the small platoons and the familiar. Burke was actually a stinging critic of the Ancien Regime, along with Joseph de Maistre, precisely because he feared it lacked the rectitude and courage to defeat revolution from below. It is fear that is central to conservatism, and that fear routinely manifests as a belief that the country is going to the dogs and that we are being invaded by grasping foreigners. In this context it's worth noting that revolution from above, in the sense of the elite restoration of tradition in the face of such threats, is not only countenanced but seen as exemplary: hence the eulogisation of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which apparently saved the country from absolute monarchy, Catholicism and foreign fashions.
In contrast, the common thread that runs through the political philosophy of the broad left, from incremental liberals to ecstatic insurrectionaries, is optimism: the belief that things can get better and that politics can effect change. Even John Harris's crude caricature of the Marxist left gets this right: the certainty that there will be another crisis and thus another chance for progress. One way of thinking about Labour's current troubles is that despite expelling most of the left, the PLP remains divided between the optimists - e.g. Blairites insisting that AI will solve all our problems - and the pessimists - the authoritarians insisting that if we don't stamp down hard on little old ladies with cardboard signs Vladimir Putin will be strolling up the Mall tomorrow. Starmer is clearly in the latter camp. His fundamental mistake is the failure to understand that the "conservative" voters he is trying to attract are motivated by optimism as much as pessimism, hence the talk of hard choices and the need for crackdowns has failed to win them over.
Michael Oakeshott's famous quote reflects the instinctive pessimism of the Tory elite: "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." But success in democratic politics requires a mix of optimism and pessimism. Since 2016, voters in Britain have, perhaps paradoxically, tended towards optimism: displaying an appetite for the unknown and untried that led first to Jeremy Corbyn's ascent and then to Boris Johnson's victory in 2019. While Nigel Farage may currently lay on the horror stories of national decline with a trowel, it is his cheerful optimism that garners support for the mystery that is Reform, and it is Starmer's ingrained pessimism that means Labour's hopes of attracting conservative voters, or even retaining left-leaning ones, will likely continue to be frustrated.
Yet if Oakeshott's quote demonstrates anything, it's that the right are certainly not conservative on his terms. Most right-wing economic policy since the 1970s has preferred the unknown and untried to the familiar, and is based on the idea that wealth and abundance is never sufficient and can and will be extended almost at all cost. Right-wing propaganda is based on hysterical fears and rumour-mongering that strays a long way from 'fact', and harks back to mythical ages that never existed or which their adherents never experienced. Back in the pre-New Labour era it was generally the left which criticised Thatcherism for causing social collapse, with the Tories insisting that the pain would be worth it in the long-term ('If it isn't hurting, it isn't working').
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