Oblivion. Possibly even extinction. That’s where the Conservative party is headed, it would be safe to assume, after the local elections wipeout, persistently poor polling and the failure of any mythical “Sunak bounce” to materialise. Based on last week’s National Conservatism conference, it looks as though the extreme Brexit-addled wing of the party is all but guaranteeing the Conservatives’ obsolescence by swimming against the cultural tide, too. Tory MPs joined rightwing authors, journalists and cultural influencers for three days of broadly bonkers, anachronistic views on family values, white population decline and the merits of nationalism, much of which had seemingly racist and homophobic overtones. Marriage between a man and a woman was “the only possible basis for a safe and successful society”, said Tory MP Danny Kruger. Douglas Murray declared that nationalism shouldn’t be underrated simply because the Germans “mucked up twice in a century”.
Weird? Yes. Out of touch? Definitely. But not entirely irrelevant. The fact that these conference attendees may soon not be in government or close to government doesn’t mean that their views hold little power, or that they are the preserve of some dangerous but quarantined “online right”. Theories about white replacement, the threat of multiculturalism, the death of Europe and of whiteness under siege have all been represented for some time in our politics and mainstream press, and among government advisers.
The story here isn’t how the Conservative party will be reduced by its public choice of bedfellows if it decides they are its future, but how large, mainstream, well funded and coherent (I use this word in the technical, rather than logical sense) this larger rightwing movement is, and how little pushback there is to it in our politics and media. The values ecosystem, populated by a majority rightwing media, gullible and compromised institutions such as the BBC and the vocal representatives of well funded, opaque thinktanks such as Policy Exchange and the Legatum Institute (both represented at the conference) has successfully blocked any change in attitudes from materialising in the form of policy or a progressive political programme. There are consistent hopeful signs, based on trends and demographics, that hardline views on immigration and minorities are not embraced by the majority of the British public in any enthusiastic way, but it kind of doesn’t matter.
Any alternatives that promote humane immigration policies, minority rights or organised objection to everything from structural racism to extractive private interests in our transport and energy infrastructure are portrayed as radical and undermining of native Britons’ interests. The legacy of that is a bedding-in of certain notions about what is forbidden in our politics – guardrails against change that will endure because the cost of challenging them is to incur the wrath, mockery and mobilisation of this “anti-woke” community. A vivid manifestation of those limitations is the rolling back of civil protest rights in the form of draconian public order laws, a cruel inhumane illegal migration bill, a dismissal of structural racism blessed by a government report and a Labour party that dare not suggest that these will be repealed or reopened once in government.
The ways in which policy, both within and outside Westminster, is determined by former governmental actors was recently laid out in a peer-reviewed paper titled An anatomy of the British war on woke. Last week I spoke to its authors, Dr Huw C Davies, a sociologist at the University of Edinburgh, and Dr Sheena E MacRae, a researcher in digital sociology working with the University of Cambridge and the University of Hull. They found that in addition to being granted “extensive access” to public service broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4, “anti-woke” campaigners advocating against climate change policies and immigration, and for the “abnormalisation of social justice” have the regular use of 20 media outlets that amplify their message, including the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Daily Express, the Spectator, TalkRadio and GB News. They also isolated five thinktanks and several “charities” that they say publish and support anti-“woke” campaigners’ views, and motivated financial backers who continue to fund loss-making media ventures.
“In no way should we trivialise this,” Davies told me. “Because it’s being translated into policy. The discourses lay the territory and make moral justifications” for policy. “It’s problematic regardless of who is in power,” MacRae added. “The number of actors, the number of channels, the space that they’re given, has allowed the vernacular to change. So much of the rhetoric is about projecting the left’s opinions. It’s about trying to do the thinking for the public. Political changes, particularly within the last six months – changes to rights to protest, threats to the Equality Act, changes to modes of voting – all add up to serious issues for an ongoing politic, let alone what happens within a particular term.”
The success of this network, the paper demonstrates, is in projecting leftwing hegemony in the form of threats to a helpless white working class: its livelihood, cultural touchstones and sexual mores. Leftwing parties are held hostage to this projection and feel they must distance themselves from it. In doing so, they dilute their own political projects and fail to reflect voters’ needs and ambitions, and those promising progressive views that are consistently at odds with government policy. In short, there are electoral outcomes, and then there are political ones, and they are not always aligned. Just because the right will be out of government doesn’t mean that it will not, through a vast rightwing network, continue to impose its agenda, or at the very least limit the agenda of its opponents.
If anything, the right in opposition, away from government and its limitations and accountabilities, could be the real danger zone – an incubation period for the Tory party and its network to escalate and finesse extremist rhetoric on racial and sexual minorities, the climate crisis and economic redistribution, and to grow and make connections with an increasingly international movement. In its wake will lie even more social discord, intense debate about people’s humanity and civil rights, and a hysterical, relentless condemnation of the “nightmare come true” of leftwing hegemony. The scale of the assault and the ubiquity of its organs may well render any Labour government – the party is already making noises about how little it can achieve in one term in terms of alleviating economic pain – impotent, or even short-lived.
In this, the anti-woke circle will be aided first and foremost by complacency. Our public discourse is so spectacularly skewed to the right that we don’t even see it any more, like David Foster Wallace’s proverbial fish that asks “what the hell is water?”. Even as the rightwing machine revs up, Labour believes that if it focuses on the economy, doesn’t spook the horses by engaging on inflammatory issues on protest rights and identity and generally “rises above” the fetid rightwing swamp, that it guards its victory. At best this is a shortsighted political miscalculation; at worst it’s a moral abdication.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist