Save the Tories

The Guardian has decided that it must save the Conservative Party from decline, as if it were an endagered species. In order to do this, it must first ignore the party's recent history, and then construct a mythos about the nature of conservative politics that reaches back more than a century to Weimar Germany, of all places. To get the ball rolling, Polly Toynbee first argues that we need a healthy Conservative Party. But what she is effectively asking for is the preservation of Thatcherism, which remains the essence of contemporary Toryism: privatisation, deregulation and a disdain for welfare. She herself admits that the Conservative Party "has presided, especially since the 1980s, over capital supremacy at the expense of labour, sky-high inequality, public service degradation and me-first individualism." There is no route from the present moment that offers a return to the One Nation conservatism of Michael Heseltine, let alone Harold Macmillan. Invoking either is futile nostalgia. Invoking both, as she does, looks like delusion. What Toynbee really wants is the restoration of the post-Thatcher cartel - i.e. an ideological spectrum running from Blair to Cameron - hence she talks up the likes of David Gauke. 

Her current fears arise less from her desire for a "better brand of conservatism" than from her recognition of Starmer's failure to establish a popular "grownup" politics over the last 15 months. What she cannot acknowledge is that Kemi Badenoch is a symptom of the cartel's steady rightward shift since the 1990s, rather than some aberration peculiar to the Tories, and that this is linked to Starmer's failure to hegemonise her preferred centrism. Ironically, the one thing that would have buttressed the Tories would have been a Labour victory under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, as that would have encouraged them to shift towards the centre-right space and present themselves as a safe alternative for both traditional conservative and liberal voters frightened by the Red Terror, even as they insisted that the people's will must be observed over Brexit. They cannot do that now because Labour under Starmer has occupied that space, and adopted the same stance on Brexit, thereby pushing Tory voters further right, hence the escalation in the rhetoric over migrants and the European Convention on Human Rights.

In another wisftul paean to the "moderate right", Zoe Williams, citing Daniel Ziblatt's research on the National People's Party of Weimar Germany, claims that "When the mainstream right loses its confidence, when it starts to chase the buzzwords and symbolic politics of the far right, it hands them the steering wheel." This is a misreading of the DNVP's history and the dynamics of the Weimar Republic. The Deutschnationale Volkspartei was formed by the merger of multiple nationalistic, monarchistic and reactionary parties in 1918 and was virulently antisemitic from the start. Socially, it was the party of landowners, industrialists and the Lutheran middle-classes. It was strongest in rural areas, particularly in Prussia and Pomerania. Politically, it took an ambivalent stance towards the Kapp putsch of 1920 and regularly called for the assassination of government ministers as "traitors". In other words, the DNVP was both consistently hostile to the Weimar Republic and had already adopted the central plank of what would become the Nazi programme before the NSDAP's foundation. It wasn't chasing the Nazis. If anything, it provided a readymade social and political environment in which the Nazis could thrive.

The NSDAP came to national prominence largely due to the platform offered it by the DNVP's push for a referendum on the Young (reparations) Plan in 1929. If there is a parallel between the DNVP and the UK Conservative Party it was in the way the former's push for a referendum divided the nation and consolidated the right around a more radical locus. But the parallel breaks down when you realise that even after the merger of 1918 the political right in Germany was still fragmented. As well as being antisemitic, the DNVP was anti-Catholic, with the result that conservative Catholics gravitated to the Centre Party in the Rhineland and the BVP in Bavaria. These two parties were also more supportive of the Weimar Republic, participating in numerous coalition governments. In summary, the "mainstream right" did not lose its confidence until 1933, and even then Franz von Papen (on the right of the Centre Party) imagined he was manipulating Hitler, not the other way round. The DNVP were Nazis avant la lettre in their extreme antisemitism, hostility to the Republic, and violent hatred of the SPD and KPD. The DNVP's voters switched decisively to the NSDAP in 1930.

Williams' German history is bad, but her British history isn't much better. "What happened to the old-school Conservatives, who treasure stability, conservation, the constitution, the pride of Britain on the world stage? What happened to the modernisers, who described the nation in terms of powerhouses, not powder kegs? Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t wild about any of them either, but it’s absolutely striking how those worldviews – the one nation Tory, the Cameroonian Conservative – have been erased, in favour of relentless demonisation: of migrants, Muslims, benefit claimants and protesters." Like Toynbee, Williams seeks to invent a Tory who never existed. But whereas the former at least tries to locate this species in the distant past, the latter attempts to set up an opposition between the Cameronian party of 2015-19 and the Conservative Party of today, which requires a lot of forgetfulness. Would an old-school Conservative who treasured stability have risked the EU referendum? Was George Osborne a moderniser, his austerity wilfully misunderstood? Did Theresa May ever tell migrants to "go home"? Did Boris Johnson ever say anything disobliging about Muslims?

You might be wondering why the Guardian thinks the Conservatives should be saved, given that the Liberal Democrats are perfectly capable of offering a centre-right alternative that the paper would find congenial. Why not celebrate the eclipse of the Tories and go all-in on Ed Davey? The answer, I suspect, is that they recognise the risk that the Liberal Democrats could outflank Labour on the left, particularly over civil rights and a more humane attitude towards immigration. This would make it too obvious that Labour has become the actual conservative party of British politics: unwilling to gainsay the financial markets, instinctively authoritarian, and mawkishly patriotic. They need the Tories in play as well if they are to present themselves as the party of the nation. The analogy of society with a family hasn't really enjoyed a vogue since the days of George Orwell ("the wrong members in control"), possibly because Thatcher made the terms mutually exclusive, but it is useful here. If the left and the Greens are dismissed as foolish youth, and Labour and (to a lesser extent) the Lib Dems are the grownups, then Reform is your racist, raffish uncle and the Tories your racist, wealthy aunt. Starmer's backers in the press still want him to be the centrist dad of the nation, despite his utter unsuitability for the role, and will happily reinvent the Conservative Party if it helps to achieve that goal.

Our People

The Labour Party's history is one of a dialogue between rights and entitlements: what everyone should expect versus what organised labour should be entitled to. This reflects the party's origins both in the radical wing of the Liberal Party, with its desire to universalise liberties, and in the particularist approach of the trade union movement, which sought to further the interests of its members. Though the unions grudgingly adopted some of the universalist tactics and language of syndicalism, notably the general strike, its focus remained limited to the bread-and-butter of self-interest rather than social transformation. Thus the aim in 1926 was to restore miners' pay and hours, not to seize the means of production. As the labour movement was absorbed into capitalist society through parliamentarianism and what became known as "industrial relations" (i.e. collective bargaining), the two traditions were initially complementary, achieving a secular apotheosis in the institutions of the welfare state, notably the NHS. This was the synthesis of universalism and particularism captured in the resonant phrase "national insurance": available to all as a right but subject to conditionality and the contributory principle. 

Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century these two traditions increasingly came to be seen as being in conflict in the popular discourse. The rights of the individual were arrayed against the privileges of trade unions in the form of the closed shop and the inconvenience of strikes. The language of the original liberal revolution was revived as union leaders were cast as "barons" and the destruction of established norms was cast as "modernisation". This was all part of the neoliberal revolution, but it also reflected the growing tensions within the labour movement itself between younger workers demanding that the movement take industrial democracy seriously and a bureaucratic apparatus that increasingly accepted the hegemonic idea that British industry needed reform to free itself of "sclerosis". The triumph of Thatcherism settled this argument decisively in favour of the apparatus even as it undermined the labour movement through recession, repression and punitive legislation.

With questions of industrial policy and property rights sidelined, the consequence was the Labour Party's greater emphasis on that liberal tradition of universalism. This translated not only into the extension of rights to previously disadvantaged communities - what would come to be known as "diversity" - but into full-throated support for European integration and a more robust promotion of human rights globally. But the particularist tradition was still part of Labour's DNA, only now reframed as the just desserts of the neoliberal monad: Worcester woman enjoying her ability to shop at Marks & Spencer's on a Sunday. The result, when Labour finally returned to government in 1997, was the peculiar mish-mash of "rights and responsibilities" that marked the party's rhetoric, together with the blithe trust in market forces and messianic approach to foreign relations embodied by Tony Blair. I don't need to enumerate the many disasters this gave rise to. The key point is that the once fruitful dialogue between rights and entitlements had by now curdled into a fractious contention between established rights and fluid responsibilities, often at the whim of the media.

The current Labour government lacks a theory of the economy, by which I mean it doesn't really know what or who the economy is for, beyond the unthinking credo of growth and its presumed material benefits for voters in the form of a profusion of goods. Consequently it has no idea how to stimulate or restrain economic activity, hence the uncertainty over green investment and missteps like the employer NIC hike, while its fiscal planning seems reactive only to market sentiment ("in office but not in power" pretty much sums up Rachel Reeves as Chancellor). Likewise, it has no theory of culture, hence its absurd attempts to monopolise patriotism, its MOR tastes in the arts, and its fogeyish attitude towards the young. But what it does have is a theory of governance and central to that is the belief that rights are conditional on right behaviour. Historically, even during the New Labour years, this was largely just rhetorical scolding, but it has started to take on a concrete form now. This is evident not only in the administration's preservation of the benefit sanctions regime introduced by the Conservative-Liberal coalition, and in its echoing of the press in treating asylum as a "golden ticket", but in its appetite for extending the state's coercive powers over protest.

The liberal tradition holds as a self-evident truth that only conservatives and reactionaries impede progress. The implication is that anything slightly to the left of them will help the arc of history bend towards justice. This is obviously not true, but it means that liberals can easily delude themselves into thinking that they are the defenders of rights even as they undermine them. The tradition emanating from the labour movement holds as a self-evident truth that the Labour Party exists to further the interests of "our people". The implication is that it is always worth voting for Labour, no matter how disappointing they may prove in office. This, rather than Peter Mandelson's claim that Labour supporters "have nowhere else to go", is the guiding light of the party's electoral strategists: get Labour into power and hope for the best. In combination, these two beliefs allow Labour politicians to convince themselves that, to coin a phrase, all voters are equal but some are more equal than others. But because of the party's factionalism, "our people" often means a very narrow segment of the population, which is how fictions like the "hero voters" of Morgan McSweeney's imagination can come to dominate political analysis. 

This also explains why Labour always appears happy to alienate its actual core vote, which it has been doing at a spectacular rate over the past year. There can be little doubt that the majority of people protesting over Gaza and the subsequent proscription of Palestine Action will have voted Labour in 2024, and also little doubt that the party's poor showing at less than 34% was not the product of "efficiency" as claimed but the result of disillusion since the purge of the left after 2019 and the steady jettisoning of Keir Starmer's pledges made during the leadership election. When you add in the reluctance to lift the two child benefit cap or introduce any sort of wealth tax since taking office, it almost seems like we're witnessing a perverse experiment in finding out how easily a political party's base can be discouraged from voting. In this light, the mood music about "reforming" the European Convention on Human Rights sounds like another attempt to woo a reactionary who isn't going to vote for the party anyway, but it also points to something fundamental in this government's worldview: that all rights are contingent because they are conditional to the needs of the moment, from avoiding inconvenient court challenges to reassuring the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The contrast with the Labour Party's embrace of universalism in the 1990s is stark, and only made more ironic by this turn occuring under the leadership of a "human rights lawyer". Despite his many flaws, Blair never doubted that Labour had to apperal to the mass of voters rather than just "our people". And while he was guilty of ventriloquising their preferences over issues such as the Iraq War, he didn't present the British people in narrow and exclusionary terms but as part of a more dynamic global population seizing the neoliberal moment at "the end of history". But it's important to emphasise that the particularist turn does not mark the revived influence of organised labour in the party, or even a commitment to the bread-and-butter concerns of the already forgotten "everyday economy" or "securonomics" that Rachel Reeves once eulogised. Rather it reflects the steady absorption of the Labour Party by the security state and the adoption of its instinctive authoritarianism. "Our people" has come to mean the apparatus itself, not the rank and file.

Society of the Lanyard

The latest round of the national ID debate had hardly got underway before pundits and commentators were hurling insults. Particularly amusing was the sight of Lewis Goodall being community-noted on X for insulting X users' poor grasp of the subject while being married to an employee of the Tony Blair Institute. Leaving aside his consdescending tone and alledgedly offensive wife, Goodall did make one useful point, though without perhaps fully understanding it, when he accused the debate of being "insular", pointing out that other countries have had ID cards for years with little issue. This is correct, but it misses that the government, and lobbyists like the TBI, are also reluctant to actually examine the use of such schemes in other countries. One obvious reason is that they do not provide evidence for many of the beneficial claims that are habitually made. For example, we know that national IDs will not deter asylum-seekers because those camped out around Calais have already passed through multiple countries with ID regimes which didn't deter them either. Likewise, none of the countries that insist on IDs for employment have managed to do away with the shadow economy.

Deterrence is a common theme across arguments in favour of national IDs: it will deter illegal immigration, it will deter illegal employment, it will deter benefit fraud. But this is no more convincing than the deterrent argument used to justify any criminal law. Making something a crime does not stop it happening, it just clarifies the consequences. The more positive argument for a national ID, that it will improve citizens' access to public services, is nowadays more likely come with citations about how easy it is to report a collision to your car insurer in Poland using the national ID app. I'm pretty sure Poland doesn't have nationalised car insurance, more's the pity, so this is stretching the definition of public services. In other words, the boundary between a digital citizen and a digital consumer has already been erased. Across the EU, national ID schemes have been captured by commercial interests over the last twenty years, which is why they have moved online. Being able to access your bank account securely with your national ID is a greater benefit for the bank than it is for you. 

A typically-breathless report in the Guardian on the subject states that "Estonia claims e-ID saves citizens about five days a year of pre-digital administrative hassle." In other words, it was the digitalisation that reduced the admin overhead, not the national ID. Nobody in the UK is currently spending five days a year routinely negotiating public services online, and obviously the introduction of an ID scheme will not reduce the amount of time you spend sitting in a hospital waiting room or queueing for a bus. One argument you don't hear from the Tony Blair Institute, or anybody else for that matter, is that a national ID scheme will increase the take-up of benefits, by identifying people who are eligible but currently don't claim. It's estimated that UK benefit fraud (some of which is actually just DWP error) amounts to over £6 billion a year while unclaimed benefits are almost four times that at £23 billion. The intersection of national IDs and benefits is always about "efficient allocation", "better targeting" and the prevention of fraud.

The UK's feudal legacy is not to be found in the monarchy or Morris Men - both largely invented traditions of the modern era - but in its parcellised approach to public services, which is reflected in the multiple and not always overlapping identification schemes from NHS numbers to driving licences used to organise it. That may seem strange given that cars are obviously a modern invention and the NHS dates from only 1948, but the point is that the state in its broadest form has always been more fragmentary and blinkered than either its advocates or critics have allowed, and the roots of its disaggregation go a long way back. The welfare state may have offered an embrace from cradle to grave, but it was never the same arms doing the embracing over time, while the dystopian nightmare of an intrusive state ignored the reality of administrative disconnection (the totalitarian fears of Geroge Orwell originated from his experiences in the very exclusive and parcellised environs of Eton and the BBC).

The worry that a national ID scheme would lead to Larry Ellison or Peter Thiel controlling our personal data is a classic case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Partly because of the parcellised nature of personal identification in the UK, they have already scooped up many of our demographic assets with minimal democratic oversight and zero public agreement. For them, the promise of a national ID is the ability to exploit the linkages between the datasets that they already control: the primary key to all the mysteries, if I may be permitted a techno-literate joke. But whether that will lead to greater insight is moot. It's easy enough to sell the state on the vision of making the population ever more legible, but the experience of Big Data has proved underwhelming, particularly in the area of public administration. The fundmental problem is one of triviality: that there isn't much to be learned by extending a particular NHS patient's record to include their driving licence. Even in aggregate, there is unlikely to be a statistically significant correlation between being entitled to ride a motorbike and suffering from shingles.

If the government wanted to implement a national ID card on the cheap it could simply issue everyone who doesn't have one with a driving licence. In these cases the card would simply have blanks on the reverse - i.e. you wouldn't be licensed to drive anything. In many countries, such as the USA, a driving licence is the standard form of (non-compulsory) ID and in the UK plenty of teenagers already use a provisional licence for proof of age in pubs and clubs. But this pragmatic approach, infomed by international practice, isn't what the likes of Lewis Goodall are seeking when they criticise British insularity. Their vision is of a common online identity whose utility to the state is almost incidental to its utility to business. And what particularly attracts journalists who face derision on social media is the prospect of doing away with online anonymity altogether. As they gather at the Labour Party Annual Conference in Liverpool to fret about Starmer's lack of vision, what they see when they look around the conference hall is actually their own vision: a society of the lanyard.

Shifting Sands

Back in the 1980s, David Icke was a spokesman for the Green Party. Though his public statements about alternative medicine and mysticism embarrassed his fellow party members, leading to his resignation in 1991 just prior to his announcement that he was a son of the Godhead, it's fair to say that the reputation for eccentricity in the public mind was not limited to just him. The Greens have always been an amalgam of different traditions, not to mention people pursuing obscure hobby-horses. Conservation has often looked like conservatism, hence the presence of aristocratic scions like Jonathan Porritt in the party's ranks, while the close relationship of envrionmental damage and poverty has encouraged what political scientists like to refer to as "leftwing economics". At the margins you will find both xenophobic nativists and hunt saboteurs. This variety also extends to the practice of politics. For example, the earlier incarnations as PEOPLE (sic) and The Ecology Party highlight the contrasting atttractions of anti-establishment populism and a more academic and scientifically-grounded approach to public persuasion.

Since the 1990s, and the fragmentation between the Scottish Greens, the Green Party Nortthern Ireland and the Green Party of England and Wales, the GPEW specifically has tended to opportunistically reflect the shifts in the party landscape at Westminster. In policy terms it has moved less towards the left, as is popularly supposed, than to the centre, for example in dumping its earlier euroscepticism and becoming pro-EU, which reflected its relative success in elections to the EU Parliament. Its embrace of social justice is largely rhetorical as practical actions, such as housebuilding, risk conflicting with its ethos of growth scepticism. Local councils under Green control have not been noted for their radicalism. When the party has gone out on a limb, as with the proposal for a basic income, it has often come a cropper as these contradictions have emerged. The fundamental problem is that you can only reconcile a more equitable distribution of resources in society with a minimal growth, sustainable economy if you commit to the expropriation of wealth, and that would necessitate a significant expansion of the state's power, which runs against the party's libertarian instincts.

Of the longstanding political parties, the Greens have had the most volatile membership and electoral support since the millennium. There was an influx of former Labour supporters in response to the Iraq War, but then an outflow of more conservative supporters to the Liberal Democrats in 2010. After getting 1% in the 2005 and 2010 general elections, its vote almost quadrupled to 3.8% in 2015. This was partly due to the return of voters disllusioned by the Lib Dems, but also to the influx of left-leaning voters disillusioned with Labour, as was evidenced in 2017 when the Green's vote share more than halved to 1.6% as Labour  under Corbyn energised the left. The subsequent victory of the right of the Labour Party has seen many leftwing members decamp to the Greens and supporters switch allegiance. At the 2019 general election Green support was 2.6%. In 2024 it jumped to 6.4%. Since then, the party has been at around 10% in opinion polls. Clearly the composition of its support has changed along with the quantum over the last two decades and all the pointers suggest this is largely down to attracting people who identify left on both the social and economic dimensions.

The recent leadership contest, which Zac Polanski won with 85% of the vote, suggests the party is going to move towards a distinctive left populism, but perhaps the real significance of the result is that it highlighted the tension between the managerial class of MPs, PPCs and party staffers and a more radically-inclined membership, something that will be familiar to former Labour Party members. With the long-trailed Corbyn-Sultana vehicle now looking like it has lost its wheels before ever taking to the road, and with Polanski's undoubted talents for publicity, there's every chance that the Greens will start to post support levels in the mid-teens, at which point they will be level with the Liberal Democrats and may even be breathing down the necks of Labour and the Conservatives if those two continue to shed support. Though the prospect of the Greens entering government as part of an anti-Reform coalition cannot be ruled out, they are unlikely to find themselves in such a position so long the UK has a first-past-the-post electoral system and so long as their support is geographically diffuse. 

The evidence from other countries with more proportional voting systems is that green parties are quickly co-opted by the cartel of established parties, sacrificing radicalism for respectability. This leads to tension between those advocating pragmatism and those insisting on principle, or "realos" and "fundis" as they are styled in Germany. The GPEW is unlikely to face that problem in an acute form due to the constraints of the electoral system, but there is clearly a difference between the parliamentary elite and the wider membership in terms both of ideology and praxis. With a party leader outside Parliament, it is likely that the Greens will lean more towards activism and protest in the coming years, which will accentuate this difference. It will also reinforce the impression of the Greens as the locus of the extra-parliamentary left, particularly if the Corbyn-Sultana fallout leads to splintering. While Corbyn remains a formidable figure, he is 76. In reality, the Your Party proposal always looked unstable given the evident gulf between not only Sultana and the "boy's club" of Gaza independents but between those wanting a party based on mass membership democracy and those more comfortable with the "organising committee" approach of Labour tradition.

From the perspective of the Labour Party, the old claim that the left have nowhere else to go is already redundant, but this won't persuade the party leadership to shift leftwards to win those voters back. If there is one principle that defines the current regime, and explains the alliance between Blairite modernisers and the old Labourist right, it is a visceral hatred of the left. The idea that if Starmer could be replaced by Andy Burnham there would be a reorientation is simply deluded. The vibes might be better, and the "King of the North" might scrap the two-child benefits cap and various other unpopular policies, but there will be no return to full-throated socialism. In other words, there will continue to be a large space to the left of Labour and electoral gravity will inescapbly drag the Greens there. The strategic question for the GPEW is whether it can broaden its voter base beyond the young and educated and make inroads among working class voters in urban areas, which would mark a significant change of direction after focusing on rural seats. This in turn is bound up with the possible fortunes of Reform UK.

The liberal panic over the prospect of a government led by Nigel Farage is ill-founded. While you can win a majority in the Commons on the sort of vote share Reform has seen in recent opinion polls, as Labour proved only last year, this requires three things: a solid core of safe seats, which Labour have in the cities; an opposition that is split nationally, allowing you to pick up lots of seats on a third of the vote; and an unpopular government that has alienated many of its supporters leading them to abstain on the big day. Reform lack any real heartlands (seaside towns are literally too marginal to play this role) and their core support is found mostly in traditional Tory constituencies, not in the fabled Red Wall. They are very good at undermining the Conservative vote, because they are mostly Tories, but there is little evidence that they can have a similarly destructive impact on Labour's support. If people are turning away from Labour, it isn't because they've suddenly discovered that they like Farage, it's because of the Labour government's record in office and the unapologetic rightwing tendencies of the faction that controls the party apparatus.

If the Greens continue their upward ascent until the next general election, Labour could find itself suffering from the factors that kyboshed the Tories in 2024: its vote eroded by both desertion on the left and abstention. This won't put Nigel Farage into Number 10 for the simple reason that the vote on the right will still be split. The Conservative Party isn't about to pack up and retire to the country and Farage isn't about to give up his earnings potential by agreeing to a merger. An electoral pact is an existential impossibility for the Conservatives, so the nationwide split must remain. The nightmare scenario for liberal commentators is a fragmented parliament, which is ironically what they have long hoped for with their support for rootless centrist parties like the original SDP and more recently the farce of Change UK. If that does transpire, it will be because the electorate splits not only on the right and in the centrre but also on the left, which means Labour losing out to the Greens. Corbyn and the left independents may well hang onto their seats, but there seems little likelihood of them increasing their number of MPs if the Greens present themselves as the only viable nationwide left offering, which is surely what they have to do.

In some respects the UK now appears to be facing what France experienced in 2022, and which was reinforced by Emmanuel Macron's ill-advised decision to force another Legislative Assembly election in 2024. The real liberal nightmare is not a Reform government but the Greens, or perhaps a left-Green alliance a la NUPES/NFP, winning lots of hitherto safe Labour seats in the cities. Keir Starmer lacks Emmanuel Macron's constitutional power to ignore the Commons in order to prop up the centre, but that just makes me suspect that he might be the most likely leader of a reconfiguration of the cartel. He isn't a career politician and has shown little respect for the traditions of parliamentary government, let alone Labour history. And as the proscription of Palestine Action shows, he remains fundamentally a creature of the security state. Liberals still appalled at Boris Johnson's arsing around over the prorogation of Parliament are, as usual, oblivious to the real danger. What form this reconfiguraion would take is hard to predict, but if the parallels with Macron hold true, don't be surprised if a national government, including Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems, emerges. It's happened before, after all, and the centenary is fast approaching.

Linehan's Law

When Graham Linehan was detained by the police at Heathrow Airport recently it generated some predictable warnings about the chilling effect of hate-speech laws on the exercise of free speech, which was ironic given the amount of media coverage then given to his tweets and his defence of them. The event was also marked by his supporters' hyperbolic claims, such as JK Rowling describing the UK as a "totalitarian state." The fact you can make the claim without consequence suggests the opposite. Now that the dust has settled, it's worth going back to the incident and reviewing Linehan's reaction to the police officers: "You know what this country looks like from America? I am going to sue you into the ground, I am going to sue you into the ground. Fucking bastards, how dare you. I won’t fucking calm down." What stands out here is not just his sense of entitlement (I'm surprised he didn't say "Do you know who I am") but his insistence that what matters is how this looks from the US, where he has now apparently relocated permanently.

The significance of that perspective becomes apparent when we consider the reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the American rightwing provocateur. This led British politicians, including the Prime Minister, to decry political violence and offer condolences, despite Kirk being a nobody on this side of the pond. Insofar as Kirk had a British audience it would be a subset of the far right groups that coalesced on Saturday for the "Unite the Kingdom" march in London organised by Tommy Robinson and graced by a video-call from Elon Musk who called for the overthrow of the government. This predictably led to violence directed at both anti-Fascist counter-protestors and the police. For Robinson's supporters, violence is a form of expression. They believe that they have a God-given right to get bevvied-up and chuck bottles at other people. Again, what we're dealing with here is a monstrous sense of entitlement. The flags that have been such a feature of the summer in England aren't symbols of inclusive patriotism but of exclusive ownership: this is ours; keep out.

Linehan was in the UK to defend himself in court against a charge of harrassment arising from another set of abusive tweets he had sent. In a prepared statement, he described himself as a "journalist", presumably not because he's actually doing journalism in any normally-accepted sense of the word, but because he imagines that journalists have a special dispensation that allows them to circumvent the laws on hate-speech. When you look at British newspapers, you can understand why he might have thought that. Alison Pearson's crusade in the Daily Telegraph to have Lucy Connolly, a self-confessed criminal racist, recognised as a political prisoner is a recent example of how mainstream conservatism in Britain has now imported the American right's instrumental contempt for the law. Two-tier justice is real, but it's an aspiration rather than a criticism, and one still best captured in Wilhoit's Law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

The undercurrent of a number of recent "political" cases has been the idea that the law should recognise and reinforce particular hierarchies, such as the superiority of biological women and the inferiority of trans women. This has even led to inverting class hierarchies. For example, in the Sandy Peggie case it is the traditionally subordinate nurse who is deemed to have superior rights to the doctor because of her biology, thus justifying her impertinence. This highlights that the right are instrumental in their defence of established hierarchies, just as they are selective in their observance of the law. The division between the far-right in the streets and in electoral politics reflects not simply a sociological gulf - former football hooligans versus former Conservative Party activists - but a strategic division of political labour based on the prioritisation of different hierarchies. On the street, the dominant hierarchy is race, with religion as a proxy. In the media, the dominant hierarchy is class. For all the focus on immigration, Reform's programme is fundamentally Thatcherite, and for all their vocal anti-racism, liberal commentators cannot hide their contempt for the street. 

The problem with this race/class dichotomy is not that it creates a fatal tension between Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage - the far-right has always melded the street and the legislature - but that it is destabilising of mainstream conservatism, for which political violence must remain a monopoly of the state. Just as middle-aged "lads" imagine that being draped in an England flag means that rucking with the police is patriotism, so the traditional hierarchies that conservatives defend can quickly be compromised when other hierarchies come to the fore. The incident of an almost parodically articulate young middle class man being chased by working class louts, forced to seek refuge at a refugee processing centre, is an example of how events can spin out of control. Lucy Connolly saw asylum-seekers as inferior to herself and thus their lives of little value. Alison Pearson's framing of her as a politcial prisoner is an attempt not only to obscure this bigotry but to re-establish the authority of the upper middle class to define our politics for fear that rage against the "liberal elites" might wash over the rest of the establishment. You can punch down but not up.

No British government is going to curtail immigration, or commence deportations, to the extent that would satisfy the far-right. As a result, the cross-party strategy appears to be to indulge and hopefully contain racist protest. This goes beyond legtimising "concerns" to turning a blind eye to low-level violence and intimidation. Starmer's eventual condemnation of Saturday's aggro as a defence of the flag was telling. Holding a sign saying "I support Palestine Action" will get you arrested. Shouting "paedo" at anyone who supports refugees won't. The political issue of the moment is the collapse of the Conservative Party under pressure from both the far-right (which it vainly apes) and a Labour government keen to occupy the Tories' traditional centre-right space. This rightward shift has been enabled by the political cartel's refusal to accept the left as legitimate, which has evolved from the false charge of antisemitism to a more sweeping criticism of leftists as "groomers" and "traitors": language no longer limited to the fringe but regularly deployed by the press and increasingly directed at the most conservative Labour government in history. This is a direct import from the US where the bogies of "antifa" and the "radical left" are routinely conflated with establishment Democrats.

Predictably, British centrist commentators responding to the Kirk assassination have been quick to insist that political violence is a problem equally on the right and the left, despite the obvious disproportion between the two. Some have even gone so far as to devote the majority of their attention to the perceived incivility of the left, seeing it as the ultimate cause of rightwing violence, which dangerously echoes the position of Donald Trump and others in the US. What this reaction makes clear is that centrists are also motivated above all else by the preservation of traditional hierarchies: civility is not about your manners but about your authority. But just as the hierarchy of class can be undermined by the hierarchy of race, so the hierarchy of liberal virtue can be swept away in the mistaken belief that dumping the European Convention on Human Rights, in favour of an American-style protection of hitherto illegal forms of hate-speech, is an advance for all of us, rather than just a victory for a minority of angry, middle-aged bigots.