Recent events have laid bare the merging of the center-right and the far-right nationalists. The Cameroons and the EDL. The Maybots and the Football Lads Alliance. How has this happened?
The European elections are usually a good indicator of two things: how the country feels about Europe, and how the country might vote in a General Election under proportional voting. Cast your mind back to 2004. The 2004 European Elections saw UKIP get 2.6 million votes, and the BNP (British National Party) get 800,000. Fast-forward to 2009 and not much has changed: UKIP got 2.5 million and the BNP got a record 940,000. There is a clear far-right/nationalist voting block represented by these two parties of about 3-4 million people, representing a quarter of those who voted.
In the next Euro elections, 2014, something interesting happened. The BNP dropped from their almost 1 million votes just four years previous to a humiliating 179,000, with UKIP gaining over 4 million. Both the BNP and Conservatives dropped by about 5%, with UKIP up by 10%. The GE the following year showed UKIP retaining most of those 4 million votes and an essential wipe-out for the BNP, who got only 1,667 votes. That voting block of 4 million had finally consolidated into one unit under the UKIP banner, and now represented a real threat to the major parties.
The 2016 EU referendum the following year saw a jostling for control of the official leave campaign by eurosceptic Tories and UKIP who, in the end, both had to have their own campaigns, with the Tories leading the official one and UKIP leading their own. The leave campaign meant lots of things to lots of people, and was poorly understood by the largely remain-voting establishment and pundit-class. It represented working class labour-voters, middle-class Tory voters, working class Tory voters, and middle-class labour voters. It was not a clean cut party or class divide, instead forging a new line through British society, in which ‘leaver’ and ‘remainer’ became key identifiers of one’s politics and worldview, no matter how lazy or inaccurate it was.
However, this far-right block of around 4 million people was located entirely on the side of Leave. Seeing an exit from the EU as a way to cut immigration, the far-right were fully on board, with the views of people like Nigel Farage hugely over represented in the British media, and scaring the Tory party. The only reason Cameron promised a referendum, as everyone in the UK knows, was to stave off the threat of UKIP. The Tories capitulated to UKIP massively by ramping up their lines on immigration and engaging in the ‘culture-war’ topics of Burqa bans, immigration, the 'hostile environment', and ‘wokeness’ (back then we called it political correctness). Sure enough, as the campaign rumbled along we saw not UKIP but a certain wing of the Tory party, the wing that had most capitulated to Farage, emerge as the real leaders of the campaign, in particular, the Mayor of London.
By the time of the referendum, the British far-right had uniformly picked a side. Remain politicians were now toxic, leave politicians were OK. Islamophobia, nationalism, and isolationism had pegged its colours to the leave campaign. The arch leaver? Boris Johnson.
Cameron immediately resigned, citing his status as a Remainer making his position untenable, and was replaced with fellow Remainer, Theresa May. The far-right, having warmed to the Tories during the leave campaign were now somewhat dismayed, abandoning their boy Boris (for now), and returning to UKIP under its new name- The Brexit Party.
The next three years saw the same thing happen to May that happened to Cameron; outflanked and ultimately brought down by the far-right, with Farage dominating the 2019 Euro elections much as he had in the past, and May stepping down after failing at the one task she had set herself- to deliver Brexit. The eurosceptic wing of the Tory party, now referred to as ‘hard-leavers’ or ‘hard-Brexiteers’ now had the upper hand, and seized the opportunity to install Boris Johnson as PM. By this point the British far-right had successfully melded into the Brexiteer camp of UK politics, increasingly indiscernible from the traditional Conservatives.
Tories who wanted Brexit for cutting regulation could now rely on the support of people who wanted it for other reasons, most notably, cuts to immigration, nationalism, and the restoring of ‘British identity’. This boost led Johnson to victory in the 2019 GE, with Farage having dictated the terms on which we would leave the EU in exchange for his tacit endorsement, mustering the approx 4 million strong voting block as a tool to force the result he wanted, and the block-heads were more than happy to oblige.
The 2019 GE saw the Conservatives get 43.6% of the vote, with The Brexit Party on 2% (some people didn’t get the memo), and the BNP on 0.001% (510 votes).
And there we have it. This is how the Conservative Party consumed the British far-right.
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